3 papers
cs.LG2026
When Does Online Imitation Learning Help in LLM Post-Training? The Role of (Non-)Realizability Beyond Horizon
Huaqing Zhang, Jingchu Gai, Juno Kim +2
Online imitation learning (IL), particularly on-policy distillation, has emerged as a strong LLM post-training approach, often outperforming offline supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Y…
cs.LG2025
In Good GRACEs: Principled Teacher Selection for Knowledge Distillation
Abhishek Panigrahi, Bingbin Liu, Sadhika Malladi +2
Knowledge distillation is an efficient strategy to use data generated by large "teacher" language models to train smaller capable "student" models, but selecting the optimal teache…
cs.LG2024
Progressive distillation induces an implicit curriculum
Abhishek Panigrahi, Bingbin Liu, Sadhika Malladi +2
Knowledge distillation leverages a teacher model to improve the training of a student model. A persistent challenge is that a better teacher does not always yield a better student,…