arXiv subjects

Yao Su

Publications and source records attributed to Yao Su.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

When the Strongest Teacher Is Not the Best Teacher: Student-Centric Answer Selection

LLM training increasingly relies on teacher-generated supervision, from synthetic responses to reasoning traces and tool-use demonstrations. Current practice often chooses the highest-performing teacher to generate student training data, implicitly treating teacher test performance as a proxy for teaching quality. We show that this assumption can fail: even when multiple teachers provide correct answers to the same question, the answer from the strongest teacher is not necessarily the best supervision for a given student. To address this gap, we propose Student-Centric Answer Sampling (SCAS), a framework that selects from verified teacher-generated answers according to their estimated student-centric learning cost. Motivated by a token-wise gradient decomposition, we derive an efficient forward-only proxy for this cost and use it to guide answer selection during training. Experiments across 30 teacher models, 6 student base models, and 6 tasks show that SCAS consistently improves student performance, suggesting that effective distillation should prioritize supervision matched to the current student rather than teacher strength alone.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

T-GMP: Terrain-conditioned Generative Motion Priors for Versatile and Natural Humanoid Locomotion

Achieving both anthropomorphic naturalness and rich motion diversity during terrain traversal remains a fundamental challenge in humanoid locomotion. Existing reinforcement learning approaches typically rely on fixed motion priors, limiting their adaptability to varying environments. We propose Terrain-conditioned Generative Motion Priors (T-GMP), a module that captures a terrain-conditioned latent motion manifold from a few expert state-terrain demonstrations. The learned priors enable smooth style transitions, facilitating a unified policy that adapts to terrain variations. We integrate T-GMP into an adversarial learning pipeline, where a discriminator dynamically modulates naturalness constraints conditioned on local terrain features, guiding the generation of versatile and human-like motions. We further introduce a Foothold Penalty to promote safe foot placement on challenging terrains. Experimental results demonstrate that T-GMP outperforms existing baselines in motion naturalness, motion diversity, and traversal success rates, while preserving physically coordinated motions.

cs.RO↗