MBZUAI x Ant Group open-source OPD work: IER selector helps thinking mode too

jiank_uiuc · x · 2026-09-23

The author confirms this is a formal MBZUAI–Ant Group collaboration, credits the team, and shares extra results: adding the IER-based token selector improves math performance in both thinking-on and thinking-off modes, with the strongest gains at 0.1% or 1% token budgets. The linked arXiv page (2609.24432) gives the full abstract: sparse OPD suffers noisy updates from useful-but-single-token teacher guidance; IER, based on a signal-to-noise decomposition, characterizes relative gradient-estimation error, and combining it with usefulness scores matches or exceeds full OPD at 0.1%–1% budgets on math and medical reasoning tasks. Code is open-sourced.

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