arXiv Machine Learning

SG-OPD: Sign-Gated On-Policy Distillation via Sign-Consistency Gating and Phased Teacher Sampling

arXiv:2606. 09304v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories with dense per-token supervision from a stronger teacher, and often outperforms off-policy distillation and standard reinforcement learning.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

Reward-Gated On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2607. 04037v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation is a powerful way to transfer reasoning ability from a strong teacher to a smaller student: the student samples trajectories from its own policy, and the teacher provides dense token-level supervision on the states the student actually visits.

By Mohammad Sadegh Akhondzadeh, Vijay Lingam, Atula Tejaswi, Chanakya Ekbote, Sujay Sanghavi, Aleksandar Bojchevski
arXiv AI
1d ago

Step-Level On-Policy Distillation: Interpolating Between On-Policy Distillation and Supervised Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2608. 16333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) aligns a student model with a teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories.

By Changhui Sun, Lanbo Liu, Hang Lei, Tong Ling, Jiahang Xie, Zhiyong Zheng, Yujia Wang, Hao Liu, Feng Xiao, Lu Liu, Yanlong Du, Zifeng Cheng, Ziwei Jiang, Qing Gu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Look Ahead Before You Distill: Future Trajectory Validation of Teacher Guidance for Agentic On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2608. 01953v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) provides teacher supervision on states visited by the student, reducing the distribution gap between training and inference.

By Chishui Chen, Yaoyou Fan, Te Sun, Yi Yang, Chenghao Sun, Delin Mao, Hongbo Qiao, Zuowei Zhang, Junxi Wang, Chenxing Sun, Yangen Hu, Lu Pan, Xuyang Liu, Linfeng Zhang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 3

Look Ahead Before You Distill: Future Trajectory Validation of Teacher Guidance for Agentic On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) provides teacher supervision on states visited by the student, reducing the distribution gap between training and inference. However, in multi-turn agentic tasks, student deviations may accumulate over time, gradually moving the trajectory away from states where teacher guidance remains effective.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

Multi-Rollout On-Policy Distillation via Peer Successes and Failures

arXiv:2605. 12652v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models are often post-trained with sparse verifier rewards, which indicate whether a sampled trajectory succeeds but provide limited guidance about where reasoning succeeds or fails.

By Weichen Yu, Xiaomin Li, Yizhou Zhao, Xiaoze Liu, Ruowang Zhang, Haixin Wang, Yinyi Luo, Chen Henry Wu, Gaurav Mittal, Matt Fredrikson, Yu Hu
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Mismatch Matters: On-Policy Distillation Beyond Token Agreement

arXiv:2608. 09836v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as a core component of modern LLM post-training pipelines, yet we reveal a failure mode: degenerate agreement, where students exploit repetitive loops to achieve near-perfect token agreement with the teacher despite globally flawed responses.

By Zichao Yu, Chengzhi Yu, Shengze Xu, Yujin Han, Bingqing Jiang, Xu Wang, Difan Zou