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Policy Distillation

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arxiv 1511.06295 v2 pith:DKREUUR6 submitted 2015-11-19 cs.LG

Policy Distillation

classification cs.LG
keywords policyagentcalleddeepdistillationlearningmethodpolicies
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Policies for complex visual tasks have been successfully learned with deep reinforcement learning, using an approach called deep Q-networks (DQN), but relatively large (task-specific) networks and extensive training are needed to achieve good performance. In this work, we present a novel method called policy distillation that can be used to extract the policy of a reinforcement learning agent and train a new network that performs at the expert level while being dramatically smaller and more efficient. Furthermore, the same method can be used to consolidate multiple task-specific policies into a single policy. We demonstrate these claims using the Atari domain and show that the multi-task distilled agent outperforms the single-task teachers as well as a jointly-trained DQN agent.

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Cited by 36 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Behavior Cloning is Not All You Need: The Optimality of On-Policy Distillation for Noisy Expert Feedback

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 8.0

    Noisy expert imitation learning requires exponential samples for offline methods but polynomial for a variant of on-policy distillation under a noise condition.

  2. World Model Self-Distillation: Training World Models to Solve General Tasks

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Self-distillation from a caption-conditioned video diffusion model to an image-and-prompt-conditioned executor, enhanced by RL from VLM feedback, enables task solving in world models.

  3. FedQHD: Closed-Form Function-Space Federated Reinforcement Learning

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    FedQHD achieves closed-form federated Q-learning via hyperdimensional encoders with linear readouts, formalizes the federation gap under heterogeneous encoders, and reports competitive performance on continuous-state ...

  4. What Does Deep Hedging Actually Learn? Delta Corrections, Regime Fragility, and Symbolic Distillation

    q-fin.RM 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Deep hedging agents learn a systematic delta haircut explained by spot-implied-volatility co-movement; symbolic regression distills the policies into formulas that retain reward and downside-variance advantages over B...

  5. VISD: Enhancing Video Reasoning via Structured Self-Distillation

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    VISD improves VideoLLM reasoning performance and training efficiency by combining structured multi-dimensional self-distillation feedback with RL via direction-magnitude decoupling, curriculum scheduling, and EMA stab...

  6. SafeAdapt: Provably Safe Policy Updates in Deep Reinforcement Learning

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SafeAdapt certifies a Rashomon set of safe policies from demonstration data and projects updates from arbitrary RL algorithms onto it to guarantee preservation of safety on source tasks.

  7. Demystifying OPD: Length Inflation and Stabilization Strategies for Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    OPD for LLMs suffers length inflation and repetition collapse; StableOPD uses reference divergence and rollout mixing to prevent it and improve math reasoning performance by 7.2% on average.

  8. ROAD-VLA: Robust Online Adaptation via Self-Distillation for Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    ROAD-VLA constructs an advantage-perturbed proximal teacher in action space to convert sparse rewards into dense supervision for online VLA adaptation and reports outperformance versus PPO across seven manipulation en...

  9. MotionPyramid: Hierarchical Motion Representation and Residual Interfaces

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    MotionPyramid learns a stack of latent decoders from motion tracking data to create multi-resolution action interfaces for RL policies in humanoid control, with residual interfaces allowing coarse programs and fine co...

  10. Dynamics Are Learned, Not Told: Semi-Supervised Discovery of Latent Dynamics Geometries For Zero-Shot Policy Adaptation

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    Contrastive learning bounds the Lipschitz constant of a trajectory dynamics encoder to support outcome-centric zero-shot adaptation in MuJoCo robotics tasks under severe dynamics shifts.

  11. De-attribute to Forget for LLM Unlearning

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    DareU reframes LLM unlearning as zeroing data attribution via RL rewards from an LLM classifier approximation, claiming better balance of forget quality and model utility than loss-based baselines.

  12. Critic-Driven Voronoi-Quantization for Distilling Deep RL Policies to Explainable Models

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Critic-Driven Voronoi State Partitioning distills deep RL policies into piecewise-linear models by iteratively adding linear subpolicies in high-value-error regions identified by the critic.

  13. Policy-DRIFT: Dynamic Reward-Informed Flow Trajectory Steering

    physics.flu-dyn 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Policy-DRIFT combines conditional flow matching with terminal reward guidance and decoupled DRL to achieve 49% drag reduction in Re_tau=180 channel flow, 16% above DRL benchmarks and with 37 times less actuation energy.

  14. Demystifying Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Interpretable Open RAN Automation

    cs.NI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    DeRAN converts black-box DRL policies into interpretable symbolic representations for O-RAN automation, retaining 78-87% of original performance while adding built-in transparency.

  15. Demystifying Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Interpretable Open RAN Automation

    cs.NI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    DeRAN converts opaque DRL policies for O-RAN tasks into interpretable symbolic policies via concept abstraction, deep symbolic regression, and neurally guided logic, retaining 78-87% of DRL performance on a live 5G testbed.

  16. Precise Aggressive Aerial Maneuvers with Sensorimotor Policies

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Reinforcement learning sensorimotor policies enable quadrotors to traverse narrow gaps at extreme tilts with 5 cm clearance using only vision and proprioception, including reactive traversal of moving gaps.

  17. Rewarding Progress: Scaling Automated Process Verifiers for LLM Reasoning

    cs.LG 2024-10 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Process advantage verifiers trained to predict step-level progress under a distinct prover policy improve LLM reasoning accuracy by over 8% and sample efficiency by 5-6x over outcome reward models.

  18. Continual Domain Randomization

    cs.RO 2024-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Continual Domain Randomization trains RL policies sequentially on randomization parameter subsets with continual learning to achieve robust sim-to-real transfer in robotic reaching and grasping.

  19. MiniLLM: On-Policy Distillation of Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2023-06 conditional novelty 6.0

    MiniLLM distills large language models into smaller ones via reverse KL divergence and on-policy optimization, yielding higher-quality responses with lower exposure bias than standard KD baselines.

  20. Attentive Multi-Task Deep Reinforcement Learning

    cs.LG 2019-07 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Attention mechanism dynamically groups task knowledge at state granularity in multi-task DRL to enable positive transfer and avoid negative transfer, matching or exceeding prior methods with fewer parameters.

  21. Progressive Neural Networks

    cs.LG 2016-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Progressive neural networks learn sequences of RL tasks without catastrophic forgetting by freezing prior columns and adding lateral connections for knowledge transfer.

  22. UCOB: Learning to Utilize and Evolve Agentic Skills via Credit-Aware On-Policy Bidirectional Self-Distillation

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    UCOB improves agentic RL by using return-to-go comparisons between skill-conditioned and no-skill prompts as local teachers for bidirectional self-distillation and skill memory updates.

  23. Regularized Reward-Punishment Reinforcement Learning

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Introduces KCPR and its deep form klDMP that couples reward and punishment policies via learned priors, yielding improved safety and stability in grid-world and Gazebo navigation tasks over DQN, SQL and softDMP.

  24. Belief-Aware Scheduling for Predictive Wildfire Hazard Mapping under Sparse-Window Telemetry

    cs.ET 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    The paper shows that deriving a structured belief from the prediction operator's needs and using it in non-myopic scheduling yields up to 28% better predictive loss than activity-paced baselines on a physics-calibrate...

  25. Robot Squid Game: Quadrupedal Locomotion for Traversing Narrow Tunnels

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A teacher-student RL policy distillation approach combined with procedural tunnel generation enables quadruped robots to traverse narrow tunnels consistently in both simulation and real-world tests.

  26. VISD: Enhancing Video Reasoning via Structured Self-Distillation

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    VISD improves VideoLLM reasoning by adding multi-dimensional diagnostic self-distillation and RL decoupling, yielding higher accuracy, better grounding, and nearly 2x faster training convergence.

  27. VISD: Enhancing Video Reasoning via Structured Self-Distillation

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    VISD proposes structured self-distillation with a multi-dimensional judge model and direction-magnitude decoupling to improve token-level credit assignment and convergence speed in VideoLLM reasoning training.

  28. VISD: Enhancing Video Reasoning via Structured Self-Distillation

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    VISD adds structured privileged feedback from a judge model and a direction-magnitude decoupling trick to let VideoLLMs learn token-level credit assignment while keeping RL stable, yielding higher accuracy and roughly...

  29. LANTERN: LLM-Augmented Neurosymbolic Transfer with Experience-Gated Reasoning Networks

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    LANTERN improves RL sample efficiency by 40-60% via LLM-generated task automata, semantic multi-source policy aggregation, and experience-gated adaptive transfer.

  30. Combining Trained Models in Reinforcement Learning

    cs.LG 2026-05 accept novelty 5.0

    A review of 15 studies finds positive transfer in DRL mainly when source and target tasks share structure or include alignment mechanisms, but compute-matched comparisons against from-scratch baselines remain rare.

  31. Detecting is Easy, Adapting is Hard: Local Expert Growth for Visual Model-Based Reinforcement Learning under Distribution Shift

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    JEPA-Indexed Local Expert Growth adds local action corrections for detected shift clusters and yields statistically significant OOD gains on four shift conditions while keeping in-distribution performance intact.

  32. ReFineVLA: Multimodal Reasoning-Aware Generalist Robotic Policies via Teacher-Guided Fine-Tuning

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    ReFineVLA adds teacher-generated reasoning steps to VLA training and reports state-of-the-art success rates on SimplerEnv WidowX and Google Robot benchmarks.

  33. Sparse Sensor Placement in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Control of Rayleigh-B\'enard Convection

    cs.MA 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Distills sparse multi-agent RL policies for Rayleigh-Bénard convection control via grouped regularization, achieving high sparsity while retaining performance comparable to dense experts.

  34. GCT-MARL: Graph-Based Contrastive Transfer for Sample-Efficient Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    GCT-MARL augments a multi-view graph contrastive backbone with per-view adaptive alignment loss and two-phase training to accelerate convergence in cooperative MARL transfer across homogeneous and heterogeneous agent ...

  35. PRIDE: Privileged Information-enhanced Distillation for Empathetic Dialogue Generation

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    PRIDE distills empathetic reasoning from large teacher LLMs to smaller students via an empathy prompt, multi-source attention, and dual-alignment loss using privileged information available only at training time.

  36. Digital Guardians: The Past and The Future of Cyber-Physical Resilience

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    A survey frames CPS resilience through five themes and illustrates them in connected transportation and medical systems to provide a roadmap for real-world resilience.