arXiv:2603. 07079v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation is a promising approach for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student learns from dense token-level signals along its own trajectories.
By Woogyeol Jin, Taywon Min, Yongjin Yang, Dennis Wei, Yi Zhou, Swanand Ravindra Kadhe, Nathalie Baracaldo, Kimin Lee
arXiv:2606. 09456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) has become a core technique in the post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs) for transferring knowledge from domain experts to student models.
By Yifan Niu, Han Xiao, Dongyi Liu, Zelong Wang, Dihong Gong, Yasheng Wang, Jia Li
arXiv:2509. 25837v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) deliver remarkable performance but are costly to deploy, motivating knowledge distillation (KD) for efficient inference.
By Yeongmin Kim, Donghyeok Shin, Mina Kang, Byeonghu Na, Il-Chul Moon
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:2603. 01875v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is an essential technique to compress large language models (LLMs) into smaller ones.
By Songming Zhang, Xue Zhang, Tong Zhang, Bojie Hu, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu
SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents proposes a new framework that adaptively reweights distillation strength at each reasoning step based on step-level divergence. This approach mitigates cascading errors in tool-integrated reasoning by attenuating misleading teacher signals in high-divergence regions while preserving dense guidance where student and teacher align. Experiments on math, science, and code benchmarks show up to 20.86% improvement over the second-best baseline, with a 0.6B student scoring 26.13% on AIME 2025.
By Qiyong Zhong, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Xin Lin, Jie Sun, Houcheng Jiang, Xiang Wang, Junfeng Fang
arXiv:2606. 24747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across a growing range of domains, yet their scale poses deployment challenges in applications where latency and cost constraints are critical.
By Lavinia Ghita, Dhruv Desai, Ioana Boier
arXiv:2602. 22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students.
By Zhaoyang Zhang, Shuli Jiang, Yantao Shen, Yuting Zhang, Dhananjay Ram, Shuo Yang, Zhuowen Tu, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto
arXiv:2602. 12262v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have emerged as powerful generative models with the promise of fast text generation through parallel decoding.
By Tunyu Zhang, Xinxi Zhang, Ligong Han, Haizhou Shi, Xiaoxiao He, Zhuowei Li, Hao Wang, Kai Xu, Akash Srivastava, Chengzhi Mao, Hao Wang, Vladimir Pavlovic, Dimitris N. Metaxas
arXiv:2606. 29869v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is a key technique for compressing Large Language Models (LLMs), yet methods relying on a single KL objective often fail to balance primary distribution fitting with long-tail probability modeling, limiting both generation quality and generalization.
By Zilong Liu, Xuewen Zhang, Jinrui Xing, Juyi Qiao, Huiyong Wang, Junming Jiao
arXiv:2609.34447v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) is becoming an important component of large language model (LLM) post-training for transferring the reasoning ca...
By Linjian Meng, Siyuan Gan, YuHan Li, Xiran Wang, Ziyang Ding, Ditang Gou, Yiming Wu, Zhen Zhao
arXiv:2609.37500v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains language models using dense token-level teacher supervision on student-generated trajectories. However, its relianc...
By Yuxiao Yang, Shangzhe Li, Tianrun Yu, Kaixiang Zhao, Taylor W. Killian, Weitong Zhang