ZeroHour
DashboardNewsCVEsExploitsIncidentsAIBriefAnalyticsEntitiesWatchlistIOCsAsk the feedSourcesFeeds & APIKiosk mode

Search: “on-policy”

21 stories

Searchkeywordsmart Sortlatesthotimportancerelevance
DomainAllCyberAIWindow24h3d7d30dAllIn the wildImportant onlyShow duplicates
CategoryAllAI research 13Model release 6AI industry 1AI tools & infra 1
SeverityAllcritical 0high 0medium 0low 0info 21

MInTRL: Off-policy Intervention can boost On-policy RL

MInTRL injects sparse judge corrections into on-policy RL rollouts, expanding exploration beyond on-policy sampling while preserving learnability on math and code benchmarks.

Minimal Intervention Reinforcement Learning periodically has a judge-intervention policy replace erroneous suffixes of the current policy's output with short corrections, then returns control, keeping trajectories largely on-policy. Training uses a sequence-level advantage-regression objective that removes the need for importance sampling. Across math and code benchmarks it consistently beats standard on-policy and off-policy baselines, remains effective with self-intervention, and performs best at moderate intervention intensity.

Hugging Face daily papers · 5d agoAI research

One Symptom, Three Levers: A Critical Review of On-Policy Self-Distillation

A review paper frames on-policy self-distillation collapse as governed by three levers: token weighting, privileged information, and guidance decay.

The paper critically reviews On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), where a language model trains on its own generations scored token-by-token by a teacher conditioned on privileged information such as reference solutions or environment feedback. It identifies collapse, the progressive narrowing of producible reasoning paths, as the dominant failure mode and analyzes it through three levers: signal weighting, the nature of privileged information, and teacher dynamics. The review is restricted to mathematical reasoning, reports no new experiments, and offers a shared vocabulary separating settled findings from disputed ones.

Hugging Face daily papers · 21d agoAI research

Verify Before You Distill: Prompt-Level Teacher Gating for On-Policy Distillation

TGOPD verifies teacher reliability per prompt before on-policy distillation, outperforming vanilla OPD across math, code, and instruction benchmarks.

Teacher-Gated On-Policy Distillation (TGOPD) estimates teacher reliability from verifier-scored teacher probes and routes each prompt either to dense on-policy distillation or to verifier-grounded GRPO, avoiding misleading updates from confidently wrong teachers under mode-seeking reverse KL. Across 4B and 35B students in mathematics, code, and instruction following, TGOPD outperforms vanilla OPD in all six single-domain settings and achieves higher seven-benchmark averages under multi-domain training. It also raises teacher-node GPU utilization from 9.8% to 78.9% in the measured 4B single-domain run by reusing idle teacher capacity.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research

Co-Evolving Harnesses and Models: On-Policy Correction Helps Weaker Models Catch Up Where Imitation Fails

Research shows on-policy expert correction, not imitation fine-tuning, lets weaker agent models catch up under evolved harnesses.

Researchers study how to combine automated agent-harness evolution with lightweight fine-tuning across seven enterprise agent tasks. Naively training weaker models (Qwen3-Coder, Gemma 4) on expert trajectories under an evolved harness regressed performance by 4 to 30 points on all tasks. They propose an on-policy correction pipeline, automated by a meta-level MLE agent, where an expert rewrites only the failing turn of the weaker model's rollout, preserving model-harness fit.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

Co-Evolving Harnesses and Models: On-Policy Correction Helps Weaker Models Catch Up Where Imitation Fails

Research shows imitation of expert trajectories breaks weaker models' harness fit, while on-policy expert correction preserves gains across seven enterprise agent tasks.

The paper studies combining automated agent-harness evolution with lightweight fine-tuning across seven enterprise agent tasks using Qwen3-Coder and Gemma 4. Training weaker models on complete expert trajectories under an evolved harness regressed performance by 4-30 points on all tasks, disrupting model-harness fit. The authors propose an on-policy expert-correction pipeline, automated by a meta-level MLE agent, that rewrites only failing turns and preserves the model's planning style.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

OracleZoom: On-Policy Self-Distillation Inspired Reference-Constrained Recursive Image Super Resolution

OracleZoom enables recursive extreme-scale image super-resolution via reference-constrained on-policy distillation, reducing hallucinations at deep zoom scales.

OracleZoom tackles recursive super-resolution, where repeated feeding of predictions back into the same model leaves deeper-scale outputs unsupervised as required source resolution grows geometrically. The framework trains on its own trajectory while carrying the last ground-truth evidence beyond the supervision boundary, combining direct and cross-scale supervision, a no-reference quality objective, a KL-constrained pretrained latent prior, and EMA consistency. Across seven datasets it achieves state-of-the-art SR quality across zoom scales, averaging 0.713 CLIPIQA with larger gains at deeper scales and significantly reduced hallucinations. Code, data, and models are publicly released.

Hugging Face daily papers · 10d agoAI research

FlowBalance: Verifier-Grounded Self-Improvement from On-Policy Reasoning Experience

FlowBalance is a verifier-grounded self-improvement method that beats FlowRL on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B math reasoning while improving training stability.

FlowBalance calibrates dense self-guidance scores with verifier-derived group advantages: guidance is retained on positive-advantage trajectories, reversed on negative-advantage trajectories, and disabled when rollout groups show no outcome preference. The method exponentially reweights a reference policy via trajectory balance, with guarantees including within-group contrast preservation and a minimum-change reverse-KL characterization. On mathematical reasoning it outperforms FlowRL on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B, trains faster and more stably, avoids direct OPSD's response-length collapse, and shows higher correct-strategy diversity on AIME24.

Hugging Face daily papers · 13d agoAI research

Eliciting Weak-to-Strong Generalization with On-Policy Reverse Distillation

OPRD distillation enables weak-to-strong generalization by amplifying verifier-supported policy updates, outperforming existing RL and distillation methods with fewer student updates.

On-Policy Reverse Distillation (OPRD) evaluates a weak teacher's policy shift relative to its reference policy on student rollouts and amplifies the verifier-supported component of the student's policy gradient. This rescaling preserves the stationary points of policy optimization while letting the student learn beyond the teacher's capacity ceiling. In successive model transfer and multi-teacher distillation, OPRD achieves higher performance with fewer student updates than existing RL and distillation approaches, and response-style analysis shows students remain closer to verifier-RL-trained models than to their weak teachers.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Cognition launches new SWE-2 model, Rivaling Fable 5.1 and GPT-Astra

Cognition released SWE-2, a coding model post-trained from Kimi K3 that scores 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main, near Fable 5.1 at 64% lower cost.

Cognition introduced SWE-2, its most advanced coding model, post-trained from the 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 base model. It achieves 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main, 73.0% on DeepSWE 1.1, and 92.8% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, beating Grok 4.6 and SWE-1.7 while matching Fable 5.1 and GPT-5.6 Sol at a fraction of the price. The company says it scaled reinforcement learning to the multi-trillion-parameter regime for the first time, using Pareto-informed cost penalties that train all reasoning-effort levels in a single run, tripled RL environments, and NVFP4/FP8 quantization-aware training. SWE-2 is available today in Devin Desktop and CLI, with rollout on Devin Web and Fusion.

Hacker News · AIupdated · 3d agofirst · 5d agoModel release 8 sourcesHN 58↑ · 15 comments1

OpenBMB Releases MiniCPM5-2B: A 2.52B Dense Model Averaging 53.9 Across 34 Benchmarks and Built to Run On Device

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a 2.52B-parameter Apache 2.0 on-device model averaging 53.9 across 34 benchmarks, ahead of Qwen3.5-4B.

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a 2,516,756,480-parameter dense LlamaForCausalLM model with grouped-query attention and a 131,072-token context, under Apache 2.0, runnable via vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, and Ollama. It averages 53.9 across 34 benchmarks versus 51.1 for Qwen3.5-4B, with strong tool-use (97.1 on tau2-Bench Telecom) and code results (69.1 LiveCodeBench v6, 46.4 SWE-bench Verified). Training combined 400B tokens of deep-thinking SFT, critic-based JustRL II RL teachers, and on-policy distillation merging 16 RL experts; datasets and intermediate checkpoints were published alongside the weights.

MarkTechPost · 8d agoModel release

SenseNova-U1.5: Towards Native Unified Visual Intelligence

SenseTime releases SenseNova-U1.5, an 8B-MoT encoder-free multimodal model unifying visual understanding, reasoning, and generation with native 4K resolution.

SenseNova-U1.5 is an 8B mixture-of-transformers multimodal model with an encoder-free, VAE-free architecture that understands, reasons about, and generates visual content at native resolutions up to 4K. Post-training optimizes specialized experts for visual aesthetics, bilingual text rendering, infographic generation, and image editing, consolidated through multi-expert on-policy distillation. Evaluations report gains in image fidelity, text rendering, multi-reference editing, and instruction following. The team plans to open-source training code including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoModel release

5 useful things you'll learn in my new post-training textbook (shipping now!)

Nathan Lambert's new RLHF and post-training LLM textbook covers PPO, GRPO, GSPO, CISPO and related techniques, freely available online.

Nathan Lambert's book 'Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback: Aligning and Post-training LLMs' is now shipping from Manning. It covers policy-gradient algorithms including PPO, GRPO, GSPO, CISPO, and RLOO, plus loss aggregation, truncated importance sampling, asynchronous RL systems, and post-training topics like rejection sampling, outcome reward models, and on-policy distillation. The book is freely available online with a 12-hour course, codebase, and exercises.

Interconnects · Aug 10, 2026AI research

Not All Prompts Are Equal: Exploration-Guided Prompt Scaffolding for Multimodal Reinforcement Post-Training

Exploration-guided prompt scaffolding rewrites training prompts by Exploration Potential Score, boosting multimodal RL post-training accuracy up to 11.5%.

The paper proposes dynamically adapting the training prompt distribution during online RL post-training of multimodal LLMs using the Exploration Potential Score (EPS), a lightweight rollout-based proxy for prompt utility computed from on-policy statistics with no additional overhead. Rather than discarding low-utility prompts, a teacher model generates scaffolded rewrites that preserve task intent while making training more informative. Integrated with GRPO on Geo3K and MMK12, the method achieves up to 9.7% relative in-domain improvement plus 11.5% on MathVision and 11.1% on MMMU-Pro.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research

DeepSeek AI Released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash with 1M Context, FP4 KV Cache, and Cross-Layer Attention Reuse

DeepSeek released open-weight V4.1-Flash, a 552B MoE model with 1M context and FP4 KV cache, beating Opus-5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on agent benchmarks.

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash is a multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model with a 552B-parameter backbone plus 196B Engram parameters, activating 8B parameters at prefill and 16B at decode, with a 1M-token context window. It introduces a causal encoder-decoder design, Compressed Sparse Attention 2, and FP4 (E2M1) KV cache quantization, cutting global KV cache to 890 bytes per token, about 1/4 of V4-Flash and 437x smaller than V1. Pre-training covered 45T multimodal tokens; the MIT-licensed weights ship on Hugging Face with vLLM and SGLang support. It scores 90.6 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 74.2 on DeepSWE v1.1, ahead of Opus-5 and GPT-5.6 Sol.

MarkTechPost · 5d agoModel release1

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash — new model trending #28 on Hugging Face

DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, a 552B-parameter multimodal MoE model with 1M-token context and KV cache cut to 890 bytes per token.

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash is a multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model with a 552B-parameter backbone that activates 8B parameters per token during prefill and 16B during decode. It uses a Causal Encoder-Decoder architecture, Compressed Sparse Attention 2, and FP4 KV caching to reduce the global KV cache footprint to 890 bytes per token, roughly one quarter of DeepSeek-V4-Flash. The model was trained from scratch on 45T tokens with context extended to 1M tokens, includes an Engram conditional-memory module (196B parameters), and is released under the MIT license. Post-training uses SFT, RL, and on-policy distillation with large-scale automated synthesis of agentic tasks and a controllable reasoning effort setting from 1 to 100.

Hugging Face trending modelsupdated · 4d agofirst · 5d agoModel release 3 sources1

Negative Self-Distillation: Learning to Reason by Avoiding Flaws

Researchers propose Negative Self-Distillation (NSD), a label-free LLM self-improvement method that diverges from self-generated flawed reasoning rather than imitating privileged solutions.

The authors show On-Policy Self-Distillation can degrade complex reasoning by forcing imitation of artificially confident traces built on privileged information, suppressing uncertainty and self-correction. NSD instead generates a question-specific negative condition — such as acting as a 'careless reasoner' — and pushes the model's distribution away from it without ground-truth labels. A dynamic gating mechanism isolates reasoning-critical tokens so gradient updates fix behavioral flaws without damaging foundational linguistic capabilities. NSD consistently outperforms OPSD and other label-free, self-bootstrapping reinforcement learning baselines.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

Miles v0.1: Production-Level Post-Training

Radix Ark open-sources Miles v0.1, a full-stack RL post-training framework demonstrated with asynchronous agentic RL on GLM-5.2 744B-A40B across 64 GB300 GPUs.

Miles v0.1 is a full-stack, open-source system for frontier-scale reinforcement-learning post-training, built on slime with rollout engines on SGLang and trainers supporting NVIDIA Megatron-LM and PyTorch FSDP backends plus three weight-synchronization transports. It supports full-parameter RL, LoRA RL, on-policy distillation, supervised fine-tuning, true-on-policy rollout-training alignment, and extends to diffusion models. The end-to-end case study ran fully asynchronous agentic RL on GLM-5.2 744B-A40B for terminal-use coding tasks on 64 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs with a median step time of 263 seconds over the first 30 measured steps. The code is open-sourced on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI tools & infra

NeoHorse-1: Towards Recursive Self-Improvement via Agentic Post-Training with Routing Harness

NeoHorse-1 introduces agentic post-training with intelligent routing that lifts agent benchmark scores at 4B and 9B scales, prototyping recursive self-improvement.

NeoHorse-1 is a family of agent-native models trained through agentic post-training: routing-harness logs (predicted capability demand, service tier, interaction) become structurally validated training data organized into a three-stage SFT curriculum plus routing-guided on-policy distillation. Capability-guided allocation converts evaluation feedback into the next training mixture, closing an evaluation-selection-update loop. Post-training raises the macro-average from 58.94 to 64.87 at 4B and from 65.60 to 69.04 at 9B across eleven agent, tool-use, coding, and instruction-following benchmarks. The authors position it as a prototype of harness-mediated recursive self-improvement.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Revisiting Complete Reasoning Traces for Post-Training

Researchers show full reasoning traces provide limited benefit in LLM post-training, with heavily truncated or endpoint-only trajectories performing comparably.

A pilot study plus attention-based analyses and controlled token-removal studies show intermediate tokens in reasoning trajectories contribute minimally to final reasoning quality. Partial trajectories remain effective even under heavy truncation, and training on endpoints alone leads to consistent changes in reasoning behavior. The finding also benefits reinforcement-learning and on-policy distillation post-training; code is released at github.com/naver-ai/revisiting-trace.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-4B — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

TokenRhythm releases NeoHorse-1-4B, an Apache-2.0 agentic fine-tune of Qwen3.5-4B claiming +5.93 benchmark macro-average gain.

NeoHorse-1-4B is a roughly 4B-parameter text-only causal language model post-trained by TokenRhythm from Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B for agent harnesses, tool use, coding, and instruction following. It applies routing-guided curriculum SFT and routing-guided on-policy distillation over execution trajectories as an early prototype toward recursive self-improvement (RSI). The release reports a 64.87 macro average across ten benchmarks versus 58.94 for Qwen3.5-4B (+5.93) and is distributed under Apache-2.0, trending #30 on Hugging Face.

Hugging Face trending models · 10d agoModel release

[AINews] 10% worse, 100x cheaper, 10000x faster: Why Simulation is taking over

Latent Space argues AI training pipeline stages—rewards, data, teachers, curricula, environments—are flipping from human-made to model-made simulation.

Latent Space's AINews essay traces how each component of AI training has turned synthetic since 2022: reward models (InstructGPT, RLAIF), synthetic pretraining data (Microsoft Phi, NVIDIA Nemotron-4 340B), model teachers (Alpaca, DeepSeek-R1 distillation), and self-generated curricula (Self-Rewarding Language Models, SPIN). In 2026 it highlights Karpathy's autoresearch loop—700 experiments yielding 20 kept improvements, cutting GPT-2 training time from 2.02 to 1.80 hours—and Z.ai's GLM-5.3 fully synthetic RL environment, judging, and verification stack. It frames these shifts as 'simulation': 10% worse but 100x cheaper and 10,000x faster than human equivalents.

Latent Space · 24d agoAI industry