arXiv Computation and Language

Adaptive Mutual Distillation for Balanced Multi-Task Post-Training of Large Language Models

The paper introduces Adaptive Mutual Distillation (AMD), a post‑training framework that jointly trains two large language models using different task‑balancing strategies. AMD evaluates and selects distillation weight adjustments via short training probes and task‑wise validation, leading to models that outperform supervised fine‑tuning baselines on six benchmarks across three backbones. Merging the two AMD models further improves performance, surpassing multi‑task fine‑tuning by an average of 2.91 points.

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 Machine Learning
Sep 22

CAMFT: Conflict-Aware Mergeable Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models

CAMFT is a Conflict‑Aware Mergeable Fine‑Tuning method designed to make task adaptation efficient and merge‑aware for large language models. Unlike existing approaches that only resolve parameter conflicts after fine‑tuning, CAMFT shapes mergeability during training by guiding each task to update sparse coordinates with lower cross‑task conflict. Experiments show that CAMFT outperforms standard fine‑tuning baselines in multi‑task merging scenarios.

By Jingang Zhou, Haiyang Guo, Yuan Ma, Han Zhu, Xu-Yao Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

Decoupled and Distilled: Task-Adaptive LoRA-Teachers with Ensemble Knowledge Transfer for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

The paper introduces TALON, a Task‑Adaptive LoRA‑Teacher framework for Few‑Shot Class‑Incremental Learning. TALON assigns a dedicated LoRA‑Teacher to each incremental task, then distills the frozen teachers into a single LoRA‑Student via Ensemble Knowledge Transfer, using a semantic‑guided weighting scheme to reduce forgetting and overfitting. Experiments on four FSCIL benchmarks show that TALON matches or surpasses state‑of‑the‑art accuracy while using up to 33× fewer deployment parameters and cutting inference time by 41.7%.

By Hongwei Zhao (School of Computer Science,Engineering, Beihang University), Rui Liu (School of Computer Science,Engineering, Beihang University), Yansong Liu (School of Computer Science,Engineering, Beihang University), Zhiyuan Zou (School of Computer Science,Engineering, Beihang University), Yong Chen (School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Posts,Telecommunications)
arXiv AI
Aug 25

From Isolation to Alignment: Unified LoRA for Efficient Multi-Task Learning

The paper introduces Align‑LoRA, a unified LoRA framework for multi‑task learning that replaces complex, isolated adapter designs with a single‑adapter model enhanced by a higher rank and an explicit alignment loss. It demonstrates that a router‑free, multi‑head model with high inter‑head redundancy can outperform more elaborate baselines, and that a unified LoRA can achieve competitive performance while enabling weight merging and zero inference latency. Extensive experiments and theoretical analysis confirm that Align‑LoRA surpasses prevailing approaches, offering a simpler, production‑friendly paradigm for parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning of large language models.

By Jinda Liu, Yi Chang, Yuan Wu
arXiv AI
Jun 2

SCOPE: Signal-Calibrated On-Policy Distillation Enhancement with Dual-Path Adaptive Weighting

arXiv:2604. 10688v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for reasoning alignment in large language models, yet its sparse, outcome-level rewards make token-level credit assignment notoriously difficult.

By Binbin Zheng, Xing Ma, Yiheng Liang, Jingqing Ruan, Xiaoliang Fu, Kepeng Lin, Benchang Zhu, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai