On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own responses using token-level feedback from a teacher. As responses grow longer, the student's prefix can depart from the teacher's own reasoning, weakening its feedback on later tokens. Updates based on this feedback can reinforce the same deviations in later responses and destabilize training. Prior approaches such as length control and loss reweighting limit learning from problematic responses but leave their prefixes unchanged. Fixed cutoffs can also discard later reasoning. We propose \textbf{Adaptive Teacher Intervention for On-Policy Distillation (ATI-OPD)} to improve subsequent teacher guidance by revising the student's reasoning prefix. ATI-OPD replaces the earliest high-disagreement segment with a short teacher segment, then lets the student resume its own reasoning from the revised text. To handle renewed disagreement, it excludes persistently divergent suffixes from the distillation loss while retaining useful student continuation. Training diagnostics show less teacher-student disagreement, fewer gradient spikes, and fewer extremely long responses. Across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks and two teacher-student pairs, ATI-OPD improves average student-only accuracy over standard OPD.
Yirong Zeng, Yufei Liu Huawei Technologies Ltd. and Peking University, Xiao Ding, Yutai Hou Huawei Technologies Ltd., Yuxian Wang, Wu Ning Huawei Technologies Ltd., Haonan Song Huawei Technologies Ltd., Dandan Tu 等 12 位作者
Instruction Following (IF) is a core capability of LLMs, requiring strict adherence to diverse constraints, ranging from verifiable ones (e.g., output length) to unverifiable ones (e.g., tone). Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has emerged as a paradigm for IF tasks, leveraging LLM-as-a-judge to assess unverifiable constraints. However, we empirically find that this approach remains a significant bottleneck, suffering from severe reward hacking and higher computational overhead. In this work, we first analyze the generalization capabilities of unverifiable constraints and discover that specific constraints exhibit distinct, high-generalization patterns. Motivated by this, we propose TinyJudge, a framework that employs an ensemble of specialized tiny language models (e.g., 0.6B) to provide rewards for soft constraints. By distilling expertise from frontier models into these tiny models, it achieves high-precision, lightweight evaluation. Extensive evaluations across five benchmarks demonstrate that TinyJudge outperforms the baselines by ~10% in average performance and 12% in reward precision. Crucially, it also achieves a 3× speedup in total training time. Our work provides a scalable and robust path for aligning LLMs with unverifiable human instructions.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
AI 速览：ToolACE提出一种自动化的智能体流水线，用于生成准确、复杂且多样的工具学习数据，以提升大语言模型的函数调用能力。
Function calling significantly extends the application boundary of large language models, where high-quality and diverse training data is critical for unlocking this capability. However, real function-calling data is quite challenging to collect and annotate, while synthetic data generated by existing pipelines tends to lack coverage and accuracy. In this paper, we present ToolACE, an automatic agentic pipeline designed to generate accurate, complex, and diverse tool-learning data. ToolACE leverages a novel self-evolution synthesis process to curate a comprehensive API pool of 26,507 diverse APIs. Dialogs are further generated through the interplay among multiple agents, guided by a formalized thinking process. To ensure data accuracy, we implement a dual-layer verification system combining rule-based and model-based checks. We demonstrate that models trained on our synthesized data, even with only 8B parameters, achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard, rivaling the latest GPT-4 models. Our model and a subset of the data are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/Team-ACE.