@inproceedings{yao-etal-2025-revisiting,
    title = "Revisiting Weak-to-Strong Generalization in Theory and Practice: Reverse {KL} vs. Forward {KL}",
    author = "Yao, Wei  and
      Yang, Wenkai  and
      Wang, Ziqiao  and
      Lin, Yankai  and
      Liu, Yong",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.148/",
    pages = "2860--2888",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
    abstract = "As large language models advance toward superhuman performance, ensuring their alignment with human values and abilities grows increasingly complex. Weak-to-strong generalization offers a promising approach by leveraging predictions from weaker models to guide stronger systems, but its effectiveness could be constrained by the inherent noise and inaccuracies in these weak predictions. To address this, we propose a theoretically grounded approach that replaces forward KL divergence{---}whose mass-covering behavior risks overfitting to imperfect weak signals{---}with reverse KL divergence. Reverse KL divergence{'}s zero-forcing effect prioritizes high-confidence predictions, effectively mitigating the influence of unreliable weak supervision. Theoretically, we extend existing bounds and derive tighter lower bounds for both forward and reverse KL divergence. Notably, when a sufficiently pre-trained strong model is fine-tuned on the last linear layer, reverse KL guarantees that it outperforms its weak supervisor by the magnitude of their disagreement. Empirically, we demonstrate that reverse KL and reverse cross-entropy not only enable strong models to outperform those trained with forward KL and standard cross-entropy across most settings, but also exhibit greater robustness to noisy labels."
}