The Weakest Link: Distilling LLM Reasoning with Worst-Case Constrained Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2610.00332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distilling the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into smaller students is a central challenge for efficient deployment. Current approaches face a fundamental tension: optimizing purely for verifiable task rewards (e.g., via GRPO) leads to reward hacking, where students arrive at correct final answers through flawed intermediate logic, while regularizing with soft divergence penalties against a teacher (e.g., KL-based distillation) dilutes task performance and, critically, allows the student to compensate for severe logical

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