Jingchu Gai

When Does Online Imitation Learning Help in LLM Post-Training? The Role of (Non-)Realizability Beyond Horizon

Huaqing Zhang, Jingchu Gai, Juno Kim, Bingbin Liu, Andrej Risteski

Online imitation learning (IL), particularly on-policy distillation, has emerged as a strong LLM post-training approach, often outperforming offline supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Yet a principled understanding of when and why online interaction helps remains unclear. In this work…Read more