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: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:2607. 27737v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in classical machine learning problems.
By Vincent Ryusuke Takahashi, Yoshinari Takeishi, Jun'ichi Takeuchi, Kave Salamatian
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: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
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
arXiv:2604. 00626v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As Large Language Models continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become an important engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains a common technique for this transfer.
By Mingyang Song, Mao Zheng
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.
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: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
arXiv:2608. 03632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-Policy distillation (OPD) transfers teacher capabilities by supervising student-sampled trajectories with dense token-level teacher signals.
By Yinuo Jiang, Yongjie Ye, Zhou Tao, Xiang Zhuang, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen, Tiankai Li
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a powerful recipe for improving language-model reasoning, but it is expensive to repeat on every new strong model because the target model must generate many rollouts during training. As models scale, post-training itself becomes a bottleneck.