Hai Du | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Progressive-View On-Policy Distillation for Regional-to-Global Transfer in Multimodal LLMs

Regional-to-global distillation uses crop-conditioned guidance to improve full-image understanding. The challenge is to effectively transfer the teacher's crop-based advantage to the student's full-image inference. We propose progressive-view on-policy distillation (PVD), which shifts the student's view distribution from the crop toward the full image through an intermediate aspect-preserving padded crop. The padded crop preserves regional content while matching the full image's visual-token grid. Across stages, the view mixture assigns increasing probability to the full image. A lightweight regional-advantage weighting reallocates token-level supervision using the crop-conditioned teacher-student log-probability gap. Evaluated under each sampled input, it applies mild reweighting when the gap is small and emphasizes higher-gap tokens when the gap widens. A Jensen-Shannon metric decomposition interprets this schedule as a shift from matched-input imitation toward the deployment objective. Across benchmarks spanning perception, visual mathematics and general multimodal question answering, PVD-full reaches an average accuracy of 77.51 over three seeds, improving on the reward-free distillation baseline by 2.01 points and on its reward-matched variant by 1.00 point. In the reward-free setting, PVD-distill still gains 1.16 points.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

ALLOT: Budgeted Hybrid-Memory Routing for Knowledge Updates in LLMs

For large language models (LLMs), parametric adaptation is costly when retrieval already suffices. We introduce ALLOT, a hybrid-memory routing framework that separates learned write priority from a hard parametric budget. A memory-aware router combines frozen text representations, retrieval confidence, and relation metadata; a single ranking supports multiple write budgets while preserving all facts in external memory. On CounterFact with Qwen3-4B, ALLOT reaches 0.760 accuracy at a 20% parametric-write budget and recovers 78.4% of the budget-matched oracle gain, with 80% fewer parametric writes than dual-writing every fact. At this budget, jointly adding retrieval and relation features to text improves normalized oracle gain by 6.2 percentage points. Complementary Qwen3-0.6B shared-store results achieve dual-write-level accuracy with 6-14.5% parametric writes, and cross-benchmark transfer retains approximately 88% of in-domain gain. These results support allocating adaptation capacity according to its incremental value rather than treating every factual update as an equally valuable training target.

cs.AI↗