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Hauptverfasser: Zhu, Wenhong, Xie, Ruobing, Wang, Rui, Liu, Pengfei
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20244
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author Zhu, Wenhong
Xie, Ruobing
Wang, Rui
Liu, Pengfei
author_facet Zhu, Wenhong
Xie, Ruobing
Wang, Rui
Liu, Pengfei
contents Knowledge distillation (KD) is a powerful paradigm for compressing large language models (LLMs), whose effectiveness depends on intertwined choices of divergence direction, optimization strategy, and data regime. We break down the design of existing KD methods and present a unified view that establishes connections between them, reformulating KD as a reweighted log-likelihood objective at the token level. We further propose Hybrid Policy Distillation (HPD), which integrates the complementary advantages of forward and reverse KL to balance mode coverage and mode-seeking, and combines off-policy data with lightweight, approximate on-policy sampling. We validate HPD on long-generation math reasoning as well as short-generation dialogue and code tasks, demonstrating improved optimization stability, computational efficiency, and final performance across diverse model families and scales. The code related to this work is available at https://github.com/zwhong714/Hybrid-Policy-Distillation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_20244
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hybrid Policy Distillation for LLMs
Zhu, Wenhong
Xie, Ruobing
Wang, Rui
Liu, Pengfei
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a powerful paradigm for compressing large language models (LLMs), whose effectiveness depends on intertwined choices of divergence direction, optimization strategy, and data regime. We break down the design of existing KD methods and present a unified view that establishes connections between them, reformulating KD as a reweighted log-likelihood objective at the token level. We further propose Hybrid Policy Distillation (HPD), which integrates the complementary advantages of forward and reverse KL to balance mode coverage and mode-seeking, and combines off-policy data with lightweight, approximate on-policy sampling. We validate HPD on long-generation math reasoning as well as short-generation dialogue and code tasks, demonstrating improved optimization stability, computational efficiency, and final performance across diverse model families and scales. The code related to this work is available at https://github.com/zwhong714/Hybrid-Policy-Distillation.
title Hybrid Policy Distillation for LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20244