arXiv:2608. 14728v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an effective paradigm for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student is trained to align its next-token distribution with the teacher's along its own trajectories.
arXiv:2609.34447v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) is becoming an important component of large language model (LLM) post-training for transferring the reasoning ca...
arXiv:2609.38025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own generated responses using dense, token-level supervision from a stronger teacher. Vanilla OP...
arXiv:2608.29846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampled-token on-policy distillation (OPD) efficiently transfers capabilities from teacher to student using student-generated tokens, requiring teach...
arXiv:2606. 22600v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) improves the learning efficiency of standard reinforcement learning through dense, token-level supervision from teachers.
On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own generated responses using dense, token-level supervision from a stronger teacher. Vanilla OPD treats all teacher signals equally, assuming that...
arXiv:2603. 07079v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation is a promising approach for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student learns from dense token-level signals along its own trajectories.
arXiv:2609.36734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) trains a smaller-capacity student model to imitate a larger-capacity teacher model by matching output distributions, implic...
arXiv:2609.39275v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own generated prefixes with token-level teacher feedback, but transmitting or storing the teacher'...
The paper investigates on‑policy distillation (OPD), showing that teacher supervision during OPD contains significant noise that grows with teacher size, yet the student policy remains largely unaffected by this noise. It finds that OPD’s gains stem mainly from suppressing low‑log‑probability tokens, a process that can be replicated without a teacher. Building on this insight, the authors propose On‑Policy Self‑Adaptation (OPSA), a supervision‑free method that uses entropy‑adaptive negative advantages to improve performance on several benchmarks, outperforming both the base model and OPD.
The paper investigates on‑policy distillation (OPD) versus supervised fine‑tuning (SFT), focusing on how students learn from multiple teachers by minimizing divergence. It shows that using forward KL divergence leads to a weighted arithmetic mixture, while reverse KL produces a normalized weighted geometric aggregate. The authors develop algorithms for both off‑policy and on‑policy settings, prove logarithmic regret bounds in tabular cases, extend the analysis to function approximation, and analyze how these aggregation targets explain OPD’s benefits and fragility.
The paper investigates how the sampled-token reverse-KL loss in on‑policy distillation distributes updates across tokens. By analyzing the gradient of the per‑token K2 estimator, the authors find that tokens with low student probability and large teacher‑student gaps receive disproportionately large gradient norms. They propose Surprise‑aware Reweighting (SuRe), a lightweight weighting rule that further amplifies this allocation, and demonstrate that SuRe improves math metrics on Qwen3 student models without harming out‑of‑domain performance.
arXiv:2606. 02684v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-Policy distillation (OPD) in large language models is shifting from full-trace KL supervision toward more selective training paradigms.