arXiv:2506. 14126v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern deep learning is increasingly characterized by the use of open-weight foundation models that can be fine-tuned on specialized datasets.
By Stefan Horoi, Guy Wolf, Eugene Belilovsky, Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
arXiv:2602. 20062v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Pretraining and fine-tuning are central stages in modern machine learning systems.
By Nicolas Anguita, Francesco Locatello, Andrew M. Saxe, Marco Mondelli, Flavia Mancini, Samuel Lippl, Clementine Domine
arXiv:2606. 09396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is an efficient approach for downstream task adaptation and often serves as the initialization stage for reinforcement learning (RL), but it can show weaker generalization than RL.
By Ke Wang, Shuangqi Li, Mathieu Salzmann, Pascal Frossard
EOPSA (Efficient On-Policy Self-Distilled Safety Alignment) addresses inefficiencies in On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) for safety alignment by focusing training on safety-critical tokens. It introduces Adaptive Rollout Scheduling, which limits generation length based on a Teacher Rescue Rate metric, and Selective Distillation, which filters out safety-neutral tokens to concentrate gradient updates on safety-pivotal transitions. Experiments on models up to 32B parameters show that EOPSA reduces rollout computation by about 50% and backpropagates through only roughly 2% of tokens, outperforming full-token distillation baselines in safety compliance and reasoning retention.
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
arXiv:2606. 12171v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) and mixup have proven effective at inducing smoothness in class boundaries; KD captures inherent class relationships in probability distributions, and mixup enforces them through convex combinations of inputs.
By Jos\'e Medina, Paul Honeine, Abdelaziz Bensrhair, Amnir Hadachi