alt Hacker News"Black-Box On-Policy Distillation of Large Language Models", Microsoft Research, https://aka.ms/GAD-project
> 'GAD consistently surpasses standard sequence-level distillation, delivering superior generalization and achieving performance that rivals the proprietary teacher. These results validate GAD as an effective and robust solution for black-box LLM distillation.'
No RL, although I'm a little bit surprised to see MS Research publishing a paper on distilling GPT5?
That's an interesting paper, but there is virtually no discussion of reasoning behaviors or optimization for long-horizon tasks (i.e., all of the recent advances in LLMs that people care about). The evaluation methodology also is pretty dated:
> We reserve 500 samples of LMSYS-Chat-1M-Clean as the primary test set. We also include test datasets consisting of a 500-sample subset split from Dolly [6], the 252-sample SelfInst dataset [37], and the 80-question Vicuna benchmark [3] to evaluate out-of-distribution generalization. We report the GPT-4o evaluation scores [45, 10], where GPT-4o first generates reference answers and then scores the output of the student model against them. We also conduct human evaluations on the LMSYS-Chat-1M-Clean test set for qualitative assessment.