arXiv AI
Jun 30

ARKD: Adaptive Reinforcement Learning-Guided Bidirectional KL Divergence Distillation for Text Generation

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 Statistics ML
5d ago

Unbiased Top-$k$ Estimation for On-Policy Distillation

The paper introduces Tail‑Corrected Top‑k On‑Policy Distillation (TT‑OPD), a method that improves on existing Top‑k OPD by combining the selected top‑k tokens with a sampled token from the student’s rollout. This hybrid approach recovers the probability mass discarded by limiting to top‑k, yielding an unbiased estimator of the reverse KL divergence gradient while maintaining low computational cost. Experiments show TT‑OPD outperforms other OPD variants in accuracy.

By Linjian Meng, Siyuan Gan, YuHan Li, Xiran Wang, Ziyang Ding, Ditang Gou, Yiming Wu, Zhen Zhao
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 29

ARKD: Adaptive Reinforcement Learning-Guided Bidirectional KL Divergence Distillation for Text Generation

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. To address this, we analyze the complementary roles of forward and reverse KL divergence (FKL/RKL) in distribution alignment from theoretical and empirical perspectives.