Language Model Distillation

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When Privileged Guidance Misaligns: State-Matched Routing and Contextualized Self-Distillation for Multi-Turn Agents
Aug 5, 2026Junzhuo Liu, Weiwei Li, Jun Ling +1Language Model Distillation On-Policy Distillation
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
SPOT: Sparse Probing and Outcome Calibration for On-Policy Distillation
Aug 5, 2026Zikun Qu, Min Zhang, Mingze Kong +4Language Model Distillation On-Policy Distillation
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen · East China Normal University · Beihang University +1
Not Every Divergence Should Be Suppressed: Counterfactual Recoverability in On-Policy Distillation
Aug 5, 2026De Jiang, Zhengyang Zhang, Kehong Yuan +1Language Model Distillation On-Policy Distillation
Efficient Knowledge Distillation for LLMs: Offline Top-K Logits and a Fused Chunked KL Loss
Aug 4, 2026Bakbergen Ryskulov, Iker García-Ferrero, David Montero +5Efficient Language Model Training Language Model Distillation
Multiverse Computing
When Teachers Mislead: Spurious-Signal-Aware On-Policy Distillation
Aug 4, 2026Yinuo Jiang, Yongjie Ye, Zhou Tao +4VLM Distillation Language Model Distillation
Zhejiang University · ByteDance · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
TQLite: Multi-LLM Jury Guided Distillation for Real-time MQM Translation Quality Evaluation
Aug 4, 2026Bhavin Jawade, Cameron R. WolfeLLM Evaluation LLM-as-a-Judge
Netflix
Stuck on "A": Diagnosing and Repairing Interface Injury in Attention-to-KDA Linearization of a 0.6B Language Model
Aug 3, 2026Ronglong BaoDelta-Rule Linear Attention Language Model Distillation
DT-Project
PCSD: Persistent Consistency for Self-Distillation in Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Aug 3, 2026Chunji Lv, Yangguang Wei, Junlin Liu +6Language Model Distillation On-Policy Distillation
Beijing Institute of Technology · Meituan · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences +1
DAPD: Dual-Anchored Policy Distillation
Aug 3, 2026Jianyu Wu, Yizhou Wang, Encheng Su +2On-Policy Self-Distillation Language Model Distillation
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · The Chinese University of Hong Kong +1
Native Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Low-Resource Southeast Asian Languages
Aug 1, 2026Sean Gip Lim, William Chandra Tjhi, Hai Leong ChieuNumerical Reasoning in Language Models Multilingual Language Models
1Nanyang Technological University · 2AI Singapore · 3DSO National Laboratories
Adaptive FastOPD: Progress-Aware Rollout Horizon Expansion for Efficient On-Policy Distillation
Jul 31, 2026Qian Tan, Huaifei Liang, Xuanyu Zhu +2Language Model Distillation On-Policy Distillation
University of Science and Technology of China · 3Shanghai Jiao Tong University · 2Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Distilling Knowledge from Large Language Models into Lightweight Reinforcement Learning Agents for Autonomous Cyber Operations
Jul 30, 2026Konur Tholl, François Rivest, Mariam El Mezouar +2Autonomous Cyber Defense LLM-Guided RL
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Canada · Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Canada · Defence Research and Development Canada, Ottawa, Canada +1
$β$ -OPSD: Deriving with Policy Optimization, Training with Self-Distillation
Jul 30, 2026Jiawei Xu, Minghui Liu, Juzheng Zhang +2KL-Regularized RL On-Policy Self-Distillation
University of Maryland, College Park
Lightning OPD 2.0: Mitigating Style Bias in Cross-Teacher On-Policy Distillation for Large Reasoning Models
Jul 30, 2026Yecheng Wu, Song Han, Han CaiLanguage Model Distillation On-Policy Distillation
NVIDIA
Flux-OPD: On-Policy Distillation with Evolving Contexts
Jul 30, 2026Yuran Wang, Zekun Wang, Bohan Zeng +10Language Model Distillation On-Policy Distillation
Peking University · Kling Team · Tsinghua University +3
Weak-to-Strong On-Policy Distillation
Jul 28, 2026Fangxu Yu, Weijia Xu, Michael Xu +2Language Model Distillation On-Policy Distillation
University of Maryland, College Park · Microsoft Research · MBZUAI
Pass the Baton: Trajectory-Relayed On-Policy Distillation
Jul 28, 2026Haolei Xu, Xiaowen Xu, Haiwen Hong +5Language Model Distillation On-Policy Distillation
1Zhejiang University · 2Yuvion Team, Alibaba Group
Outcome-Confounded Local Supervision in On-Policy Distillation
Jul 26, 2026Guoqing MaCredit Assignment in RL Language Model Distillation
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Cross-Tokenizer On-Policy Distillation via Byte-Prefix Marginalization
Jul 24, 2026Hao Wang, Kun Yuan, Wenlin Zhong +4Cross-Tokenizer Knowledge Distillation LLM Compression
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · KwaiKAT Team · Zhejiang University +1
X $^3$ -OPD: Distilling Reasoning into Large Audio-Language Models via On-Policy Alignment
Jul 23, 2026Dongjie Fu, Di Cao, Xize Cheng +6Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation Audio Reasoning
1Tencent Hunyuan · 2Zhejiang University
Sample-Efficient Learning from Agent Experience
Jul 23, 2026Chenhui Gou, Haoqin Tu, Yunhao Fang +2In-Context RL Language Model Distillation
Monash University · ByteDance Seed
REGEN: Replay-recycling for Expert-to-Generalist distillation with Offline Reinforcement Learning
Jul 21, 2026Yunjie Chen, Xiaoxin Chen, Fang WangRL for Language Models RL for Language Model Reasoning
vivo AI Lab, Shenzhen, China · Department of Computer Science, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China
Contrastive On-Policy Distillation
Jul 21, 2026Jiacheng Ruan, Jun Tang, Wenzhen Yuan +5Language Model Distillation On-Policy Distillation
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Alibaba Group
H $^2$ SD: Hybrid Hindsight Self-Distillation
Jul 21, 2026Qiye Cai, Yichuan Ma, Peiji Li +6RL for Language Model Reasoning Language Model Distillation
1Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · 2Harbin Institute of Technology · 3Fudan University +1
Rationale-Guided Knowledge Distillation for Cross-Lingual Stance Detection
Jul 21, 2026Qiuli Zhou, Jingyuan Yao, Shengeng Tang +3Stance Detection Language Model Distillation
School of Foreign Studies, Hefei University of Technology, China · School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, China · School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology +1
Trace-Based On-Policy Distillation for Masked Diffusion Language Models
Jul 18, 2026Haolin Ren, Ziyang Huang, Chenhao Yuan +2Masked Diffusion Models Diffusion Model Distillation
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
On-Policy Delta Distillation
Jul 16, 2026Byeongho Heo, Jaehui Hwang, Sangdoo Yun +1RL for Language Model Reasoning Language Model Distillation
NAVER AI Lab
Gold-Guided Programmatic Distillation for Financial Reasoning over Hybrid Tables and Text
Jul 16, 2026Yun Dong, Erica Zhao, Elana ChenTable QA Financial QA
College of Computing · Georgia Institute of Technology · Department of Management Science & Engineering +2
Answer-Conditioned Chains of Thought Degrade Verifiable-Reasoning Distillation in Large Language Models
Jul 16, 2026Jungseob Lee, Seungyoon Lee, Suhyune Son +4CoT Distillation Language Model Distillation
1Korea University · 2Zoom Communications · 3Yonsei University
Consensus as Privileged Context for Label-Free Self-Distillation
Jul 15, 2026John Gkountouras, Josip Jukić, Ivan TitovSelf-Training for Language Models Language Model Distillation
1ILLC, University of Amsterdam · 2ILCC, University of Edinburgh

Aug 5, 2026, cs.AIJ/K move · Enter open · S save

When Privileged Guidance Misaligns: State-Matched Routing and Contextualized Self-Distillation for Multi-Turn Agents

Junzhuo Liu, Weiwei Li, Jun Ling, Peng Wang

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Language Model Distillation On-Policy Distillation Knowledge Distillation RL for LLM Agents

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Privileged on-policy distillation provides dense supervision for multi-turn agents by allowing a synchronized teacher to re-score the student's response at every turn with access to training-only references, such as successful trajectories. In interactive environments, however, the student's preceding actions continually change the execution state. As the student takes different actions or completes subgoals in a different order, its rollout may reach states not covered by the reference, making the reference an unreliable source of guidance for the state actually reached. Applying privileged distillation indiscriminately therefore creates state--reference mismatch. This mismatch motivates a central objective: providing privileged reference guidance that remains compatible with the student's current execution state. We introduce State-Matched Routing and Contextualized Self-Distillation (SMRC-SD), which explicitly determines when and how a privileged trajectory should guide an on-policy student. At each turn, SMRC-SD verifies whether the student's current execution state matches a supported state along the reference trajectory. Distillation is applied only at matched states, filtering out turns for which the reference lacks locally compatible guidance. For each matched state, SMRC-SD further constructs state-conditioned teacher context from the successful trajectory, grounding supervision in the state actually reached. Across ALFWorld and WebShop, SMRC-SD consistently outperforms unconditional successful full-path distillation. With Qwen3-1.7B, it improves task success from

0.746

0.865

on ALFWorld and from

0.574

0.693

on WebShop. Controlled routing and context ablations support both selecting locally supported turns and constructing state-compatible teacher context as contributors to these gains. Code is available at https://github.com/liujunzhuo/SMRC-SD.

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