Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards yields no group-relative signal when rollout groups are uniformly correct or uniformly wrong, which account for 63. 0-68.
arXiv:2608. 09826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards yields no group-relative signal when rollout groups are uniformly correct or uniformly wrong, which account for 63.
arXiv:2605.28791v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (SD) improves LLM reasoning by using teacher-side privileged information (PI) to turn sparse verifier outcomes in...
arXiv:2608. 04794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation (SD) has emerged as a compute-efficient alternative to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards: a self-teacher, conditioned on privileged information (PI) about the answer such as a reference solution, supplies dense per-token supervision to a student that never sees it.
The paper investigates on‑policy distillation (OPD), showing that teacher supervision during OPD contains significant noise that grows with teacher size, yet the student policy remains largely unaffected by this noise. It finds that OPD’s gains stem mainly from suppressing low‑log‑probability tokens, a process that can be replicated without a teacher. Building on this insight, the authors propose On‑Policy Self‑Adaptation (OPSA), a supervision‑free method that uses entropy‑adaptive negative advantages to improve performance on several benchmarks, outperforming both the base model and OPD.
arXiv:2608. 12957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) learns from reward differences within a rollout group, but receives no useful relative signal when every sampled response is incorrect.
The paper investigates how teacher signals influence parameter updates in Multi‑Teacher On‑Policy Distillation (MOPD) by analyzing Qwen3‑1.7B and SmolLM3‑3B. It shows that loss averaging, Adam’s first‑moment bias, BF16 rounding, and the choice of averaging rule all shape the gradients and ultimately affect task performance. The study quantifies these effects, revealing, for example, that token‑averaging favors longer responses and that BF16 rounding masks most weight changes.
arXiv:2609.01532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Logit-based knowledge distillation (KD) is used to train smaller language models (LMs) via supervision from stronger teachers, but whether its benefits...
arXiv:2605. 11458v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy self-distillation has become a strong recipe for LLM reasoning, where a privileged teacher supervises the student's own rollouts while conditioning on the reference solution.
arXiv:2607. 26246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns a student with the teacher's token-level distribution on the student's own rollouts, is an effective paradigm for transferring capabilities across LLMs.
arXiv:2609.39338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge distillation transfers knowledge by encouraging a student to match a teacher's predicted class probabilities. These probabilities express not...
RetireOPD introduces a self-retiring on‑policy distillation method for agentic reinforcement learning. It first trains a skill‑conditioned teacher with environment rewards, then jointly trains a skill‑free student with RL and OPD, allowing the student to autonomously stop using the teacher when its performance aligns with the teacher’s. Experiments on Qwen2.5 models show significant gains in ALFWorld success rates and WebShop accuracy compared to RL baselines and the teacher itself.
arXiv:2608. 01735v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy (self) distillation (OPSD) is increasingly adopted for language-model post-training.