arXiv Machine Learning

SODA: Semi On-Policy Black-Box Distillation for Large Language Models

arXiv:2604. 03873v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Black-box knowledge distillation for large language models presents a strict trade-off.

arXiv AI
Jul 14

Stable On-Policy Distillation through Adaptive Target Reformulation

arXiv:2601. 07155v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely adopted technique for transferring knowledge from large language models to smaller student models; however, conventional supervised KD often suffers from a distribution mismatch between training and inference.

By Ijun Jang, Jewon Yeom, Juan Yeo, Hyunggyu Lim, Taesup Kim
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Uni-OPD: Unifying On-Policy Distillation with a Dual-Perspective Recipe

arXiv:2605. 03677v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for consolidating the capabilities of specialized expert models into a single student model.

By Wenjin Hou, Shangpin Peng, Weinong Wang, Zheng Ruan, Yue Zhang, Zhenglin Zhou, Mingqi Gao, Yifei Chen, Kaiqi Wang, Hongming Yang, Chengquan Zhang, Zhuotao Tian, Han Hu, Yi Yang, Fei Wu, Hehe Fan
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Beyond SFT-to-RL: Pre-alignment via Black-Box On-Policy Distillation for Multimodal RL

arXiv:2604. 28123v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The standard post-training recipe for large multimodal models (LMMs) applies supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on curated demonstrations followed by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR).

By Sudong Wang, Weiquan Huang, Xiaomin Yu, Zuhao Yang, Hehai Lin, Keming Wu, Chaojun Xiao, Chen Chen, Wenxuan Wang, Beier Zhu, Yunjian Zhang, Chengwei Qin
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

On-Policy Distillation for Vision-Language Model Adaptation, an Effective Paradigm on Low-Quality Multimodal Data

arXiv:2609.10321v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge distillation offers an efficient route to transfer a task-adapted vision-language teacher to a compact student. The training target in curren...

By Hongyuan Zhang, Xianda Guo, Yanlun Peng, Qianlong Yang, Yubin Guo, Pinhan Fu, Mulin Chen, Xiaozhen Qiao, Ping Luo
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Recursive Self-Improvement via On-Policy Distillation for Reasoning

The paper introduces a recursive self-improvement framework for language models that replaces an external teacher with a frozen copy of the student, enabling dynamic co-evolution (DCE) and self-refined concise learning (SRCL). DCE allows the privileged teacher to evolve alongside the student, while SRCL trains on shorter, verified rewrites to reduce verbosity. Experiments show that the combined DCE+SRCL approach outperforms traditional on‑policy self‑distillation across multiple model sizes and math benchmarks, achieving significant accuracy gains and shorter outputs.

By Shangjian Yin, Zehao Zhao, Kavosh Asadi, Rui Liu, Yuchen Lu, Shike Mei, Hang Cui, Luke Simon, Zhouxing Shi, Hamed Firooz
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 10

RL-Native Distillation: Exploiting Scored Trajectories for Few-Step Image Generation

Efficient text-to-image generation requires both reinforcement-learning (RL)-based reward alignment and few-step distillation, yet these procedures are typically performed sequentially, increasing training cost and risking the loss of reward gains during compression. We instead take an RL-native perspective: diffusion RL already generates reward-scored finite-step trajectories, whose intermediate states provide a natural source of distillation supervision rather than a disposable byproduct of sampling.

arXiv AI
6d ago

Persistent Negatives for Adversarial Black-Box On-Policy Distillation

The paper introduces Persistent Negative Adversarial Distillation, a method that improves black-box on-policy distillation by maintaining a live pool of historical teacher–student comparisons to stabilize the discriminator’s negative distribution. By anchoring the discriminator with these persistent negatives, the approach reduces reward-estimation error and yields smoother, higher-performing student policies across multiple benchmarks. The study demonstrates that the choice of negative samples is a critical design factor in effective black-box distillation.

By Haixu Ma, Saad Lahrichi, Weiwei Li, Kevin Han, Weiqiang Wu, Peggy Yang, Dongzhuo Li, Ruiyi Li, Serena Li, Gedi Zhou, Mingze Gao, Abhishek Kumar, Xiangjun Fan, Lizhu Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 11

RL-Native Distillation: Exploiting Scored Trajectories for Few-Step Image Generation

arXiv:2608. 09226v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficient text-to-image generation requires both reinforcement-learning (RL)-based reward alignment and few-step distillation, yet these procedures are typically performed sequentially, increasing training cost and risking the loss of reward gains during compression.

By Yuhan Li, Fangao Zeng, Sicong Kang, Mengfei Xu, Hao Zhou, Wei Li, Pipei Huang, Bingbing Ni