Zhongcai Lyu
Author directory2026
RoCo-ACE: Rollout-Conditioned Online Distillation for Retention-Aware Knowledge Injection
Yan Hong | Wei Li | Kedong Xiu | Jun Lan | Shuheng Zhou | Zhongcai Lyu | Huijia Zhu | Weiqiang Wang | Jianfu Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yan Hong | Wei Li | Kedong Xiu | Jun Lan | Shuheng Zhou | Zhongcai Lyu | Huijia Zhu | Weiqiang Wang | Jianfu Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Knowledge injection updates pretrained MLLMs with new factual or domain-specific knowledge, but fitting full authoritative answers can cause drift in non-updated behavior. Online distillation limits this drift by training on model-generated rollouts, yet uniform reference-conditioned distillation gives coarse supervision: it can under-emphasize reference-supported rollout tokens and supervise omitted facts only indirectly. We introduce RoCo-ACE, a rollout-conditioned online distillation objective for knowledge injection: RoCo uses same-rollout reference-free/reference-conditioned likelihood contrast to reallocate additional distillation weight to reference-supported rollout tokens, while ACE adds sparse reference-side anchored correction for authoritative anchors omitted from the rollout, without full-answer imitation. Across three knowledge-injection settings, six retention benchmarks, multiple baselines and base models, RoCo-ACE achieves the best injected-knowledge accuracy among compared methods while keeping evaluated retention close to the base model.