DIVE: Dynamic In-context Vector Distillation with Decisive-Token Supervision for Long-form Medical Report Generation
DIVE is a frozen-backbone distillation framework that addresses a fundamental limitation in token-level in-context vector distillation: uniform cross-entropy supervision treats all output tokens equally, but long-form outputs like medical reports are dominated by low-information template tokens while diagnostically critical tokens receive insufficient gradient signal. The method introduces decisive-token supervision (upweighting pathology-related tokens and EOS events) and state-conditioned dynamic steering (hidden-state-dependent adapters replacing fixed residuals) to correct supervision imbalance and autoregressive drift. Evaluated on MIMIC-CXR and CheXpert Plus with two medical VLM backbones, DIVE achieves best BLEU-4, ROUGE-L, and RadGraph F1 across all dataset-backbone combinations while remaining competitive on CheXbert F1.
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DelTA: Discriminative Token Credit Assignment for RLVR Training
DelTA introduces a discriminative token credit assignment method for reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) that addresses the problem of high-frequency formatting tokens dominating policy gradient updates. The method estimates per-token coefficients to amplify side-specific gradient directions and downweight shared or weakly discriminative ones, making the effective update direction more contrastive. On seven mathematical benchmarks, DelTA outperforms same-scale baselines by 3.26 and 2.62 average points on Qwen3-8B-Base and Qwen3-14B-Base respectively, with additional gains on code generation tasks.
Step-aligned critique outperforms GRPO and reference-solution conditioning in self-distillation
A new arXiv paper investigates context design for self-distillation of language models, comparing binary reward (GRPO), reference solutions, and step-by-step critiques aligned to the solver's reasoning trace. Step-aligned critique yields the largest gains, outperforming GRPO by 16.11 points and reference-solution conditioning by 5.27 points on Avg@12. Per-token advantage analysis shows that step-aligned feedback targets only failing tokens, avoiding unnecessary pressure on already-correct reasoning steps. The findings suggest structural alignment between feedback and the model's reasoning trace is a key driver of self-distillation effectiveness.
DistIL: Distributional DAgger for RL from Rich Feedback beyond single-bit rewards
A new arXiv preprint introduces DistIL, a distributional variant of the DAgger imitation learning algorithm designed to exploit rich feedback signals (execution traces, tool outputs, expert corrections) rather than the single-bit correctness reward used in standard RLVR. The method uses a forward cross-entropy objective that provides monotonic policy improvement guarantees, unlike reverse KL or Jensen-Shannon divergence objectives used in prior self-distillation approaches. Empirically, DistIL outperforms RLVR and self-distillation baselines on scientific reasoning, coding, and hard math benchmarks.
TunerDiT: Training-free Progressive Steering of Diffusion Transformers for Multi-Event Video Generation
TunerDiT is a training-free method for steering video diffusion transformers (DiTs) to generate long-horizon videos containing multiple sequential events. The approach identifies intrinsic turning points in the DiT denoising trajectory where text conditioning shifts from global layout to fine-grained detail, then applies two steering mechanisms: Event-Partitioned Masking and Cross-Event Prompt Fusion. The authors also introduce Meve, a benchmark prompt suite for multi-event video generation, and report state-of-the-art results across 8 metrics with improved text alignment scaling with event count.
d-OPSD: First on-policy self-distillation framework tailored for diffusion LLMs
Researchers introduce d-OPSD, the first on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) framework designed specifically for diffusion large language models (dLLMs). The method addresses a fundamental mismatch between existing autoregressive OPSD approaches and dLLMs' arbitrary-order generation by using suffix conditioning on self-generated answers and step-level rather than token-level divergence supervision. Across four reasoning benchmarks, d-OPSD outperforms RLVR and SFT baselines while requiring only ~10% of the optimization steps of RLVR, suggesting strong sample efficiency gains for dLLM post-training.
Reverse Probing: Supervised Token-level Uncertainty Quantification for LLMs in Clinical Text
The paper introduces Reverse Probing, a novel uncertainty quantification framework designed specifically for clinical text summarization that estimates token-level uncertainty from pre-existing labeled summaries rather than sampling new outputs. It extracts uncertainty signals from four categories of internal model activations, treating text as a probe into the model's internal state. Evaluated on two expert-annotated clinical datasets, it outperforms eight adapted baselines on all metrics, achieving up to 4× higher AUPRC while reducing inference time and compute. Feature analysis identifies delta energy and neighborhood context as the most consistent predictors of uncertainty across models.
ZEDA: Post-Trained MoE Models Can Skip Half Their Experts via Self-Distillation
This paper introduces Zero-Expert Self-Distillation Adaptation (ZEDA), a framework that converts static post-trained Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models into dynamic ones without pre-training from scratch. ZEDA injects parameter-free zero-output experts into each MoE layer and uses two-stage self-distillation with the original model as a frozen teacher. Applied to Qwen3-30B-A3B and GLM-4.7-Flash across 11 benchmarks, ZEDA eliminates over 50% of expert FLOPs with marginal accuracy loss and achieves approximately 1.20× end-to-end inference speedup, outperforming the strongest dynamic MoE baseline by 4–6 points.
Sentence-Level Clinical Provenance Categorization for Multidisciplinary Hospital Summarization Using Fine-Tuned Llama-3
This pilot study presents a pipeline for categorizing sentence-level clinical provenance across multi-source hospital notes, targeting structured summarization in high-complexity settings like the NICU. The authors fine-tune Llama-3 8B and 70B models on MedSecId (MIMIC-III annotations), achieving Macro F1 above 92% in-domain. Cross-domain evaluation reveals a scale-dependent transfer effect: SFT substantially improves the 70B model (+7% Macro F1) but yields only marginal gains for the 8B model. A quantized fine-tuned 70B model outperforms its full-precision baseline while reducing compute, suggesting quantized adaptation is viable for structured clinical NLP tasks.