arXiv:2608. 02829v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model families train every size from scratch.
By Ravi Satya Durga Prasad Yenugula
The paper proposes a reward‑density principle for language‑model post‑training: sparse sequence‑level rewards are best for exploring and discovering new behaviors in a strong teacher, while dense token‑level teacher supervision is optimal for compressing that behavior into a smaller deployment model. The authors validate this rule with a four‑stage workflow—teacher RL, forward‑KL warmup, on‑policy distillation, and optional post‑bridge student RL—showing that an RL‑improved 8B teacher distilled through a dense bridge outperforms direct GRPO on a 1.7B student across math and code benchmarks. Ablation studies confirm each stage’s contribution, and the approach generalizes to Llama and Qwen models, offering a practical guideline for allocating scarce labeled data.
By Yuanda Xu, Hejian Sang, Zhengze Zhou, Ran He, Zhipeng Wang, Alborz Geramifard
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.
By Fangxu Yu, Zinan Lin, Xiaodong Liu, Weijia Xu, Michael Xu, Tianyi Zhou, Jianfeng Gao
arXiv:2609.14715v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We scale our conventional sub-150M pretraining recipe from 53.5M to 109.7M parameters, holding the method fixed (Qwen3-style decoder with grouped-query...
By Dushyant Rajput (AltSlate Labs LLP), Nirdesh Chauhan (AltSlate Labs LLP), Siddharth Kosaraju (AltSlate Labs LLP)
The paper investigates converting a large pretrained transformer (1.4 B parameters) into a smaller sibling (410 M) by studying representation alignment and parameter projection. It finds that dense weight projection destroys structure, and that a low‑budget, structure‑aware compensation—separating least‑squares function alignment from variance‑preserving rescaling—yields significant gains on token‑efficient training, outperforming subcloning and standard distillation pipelines at matched budgets.
By Ravi Satya Durga Prasad Yenugula
arXiv:2608.21098v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Fusing prior knowledge with data-driven learning is attractive where data is scarce, yet no controlled account says when it helps, is redundant, or har...
By Ahmad AlMughrabi, Albert Clop, Benjamin Busam, Ricardo Marques, Petia Radeva