On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts under a frozen teacher, mitigating the distribution mismatch of off-policy supervision. While prior work has primarily trained on problems a student can largely solve, we ask whether OPD can improve a student when training is restricted to problems it currently fails. We evaluate five representative OPD mechanisms with Qwen-3 and Phi-4 models under a unified competition-mathematics protocol. We find that OPD does not improve accuracy on this hard subset, with most mechanisms instead degrading performance despite continued decreases in training KL divergence. All eight configurations show a decline, and the two-sided sign test gives p=0.0078. In contrast, the same pipeline improves accuracy by 4.6 percentage points when training is not concentrated on failures, showing that the failure is conditional on the training regime rather than systematic. These findings suggest that OPD is effective when supervision is dominated by correct student prefixes, but can reinforce existing errors when training is concentrated on problems the student currently fails.
The results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.
Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· Information and Software Tec...· 394 citations· ⚡54
The possibility of inferring high-dimensional data inference in a model that consists of a prior and an auxiliary differentiable constraint given some additional information is considered, thereby allowing a range of potential applications in adapting models to new domains and tasks.
Alexandros Graikos, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, N. Jojic et al.· Neural Information Processin...· 316 citations· ⚡15
It is proved that any global minimizer of the trajectory balance objective can define a policy that samples exactly from the target distribution, and empirically demonstrate the benefits of the trajectories balance objective for GFlowNet convergence, diversity of generated samples, and robustness to long action sequenc...
Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Moksh Jain, Emmanuel Bengio et al.· Neural Information Processin...· 302 citations· ⚡60
GAOKAO-Bench is introduced, an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese GAOKAO examination as test samples, including both subjective and objective questions that contribute a robust evaluation benchmark for future large language models and offers valuable insights into the advantages and limitations...
Xiaotian Zhang, Chun-yan Li, Yi Zong et al.· arXiv.org· 216 citations· ⚡17
An algorithm is proposed which leverages disentangled semantic factors to generate adversarial perturbation by altering controlled semantic attributes to fool the learner towards various "adversarial" targets.
Haonan Qiu, Chaowei Xiao, Lei Yang et al.· arXiv.org· 208 citations· ⚡17
This work proposes a HALO that directly maximizes the utility of generations instead of maximizing the log-likelihood of preferences, and suggests that the best loss depends on the inductive biases most appropriate for a given setting, an oft-overlooked consideration.
Machine-learning networks can learn without detailed instructions from a designer. Those that do may offer insight into how the brain reorganizes itself during learning.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduSep 29, 2026
Professor Sherry Turkle’s new book, “Artificial Intimacy,” offers a withering critique of chatbots and the antisocial dynamics she believes they encourage.
