The paper introduces SCOUT, a co‑training framework that adapts an off‑policy teacher to better continue from student‑generated prefixes in on‑policy distillation (OPD). By periodically optimizing the teacher’s conditional continuation ability using reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, SCOUT improves the teacher’s performance on student prefixes. Experiments across various teacher‑student setups, model scales, and reasoning domains show that SCOUT consistently enhances the effectiveness of OPD.
By Langlin Huang, Hao Liu, Mononito Goswami, Xinyu Li, Prithwith Jana, Nikos Kanakaris, Patrick Bl\"obaum, Purak Jain
arXiv:2606. 08432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a central post-training tool for large language models (LLMs), providing dense per-token teacher supervision along the student's own rollouts.
By Li Jiang, Haoran Xu, Yichuan Ding, Amy Zhang
arXiv:2609.33455v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its own trajectories using dense token-level feedback from a stronger teacher model. Since e...
By Zizhuo Lin, Quanling Liu, Yi Yang, Yawei Luo
On-policy distillation (OPD) aligns a student model with a teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories. This approach has achieved strong empirical gains and can often surpass conve...
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
SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents proposes a new framework that adaptively reweights distillation strength at each reasoning step based on step-level divergence. This approach mitigates cascading errors in tool-integrated reasoning by attenuating misleading teacher signals in high-divergence regions while preserving dense guidance where student and teacher align. Experiments on math, science, and code benchmarks show up to 20.86% improvement over the second-best baseline, with a 0.6B student scoring 26.13% on AIME 2025.
By Qiyong Zhong, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Xin Lin, Jie Sun, Houcheng Jiang, Xiang Wang, Junfeng Fang
The paper introduces a recursive self-improvement framework for language models that replaces an external teacher with a frozen copy of the student, enabling dynamic co-evolution (DCE) and self-refined concise learning (SRCL). DCE allows the privileged teacher to evolve alongside the student, while SRCL trains on shorter, verified rewrites to reduce verbosity. Experiments show that the combined DCE+SRCL approach outperforms traditional on‑policy self‑distillation across multiple model sizes and math benchmarks, achieving significant accuracy gains and shorter outputs.
By Shangjian Yin, Zehao Zhao, Kavosh Asadi, Rui Liu, Yuchen Lu, Shike Mei, Hang Cui, Luke Simon, Zhouxing Shi, Hamed Firooz
arXiv:2608. 03632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-Policy distillation (OPD) transfers teacher capabilities by supervising student-sampled trajectories with dense token-level teacher signals.
By Yinuo Jiang, Yongjie Ye, Zhou Tao, Xiang Zhuang, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen, Tiankai Li
arXiv:2608. 19408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an effective framework for post-training language models by pairing student-generated trajectories with dense token-level supervision from a teacher.
By Chen Yang, Haiyuan Wan, Rengrong Xiong, Yize Chen, Danny H. K. Tsang
Teacher Should Think Ahead: Adaptive Continuations for Reliable On-Policy Distillation explores how on‑policy distillation (OPD) can be improved by addressing teacher uncertainty that contracts as the teacher continues from a student‑generated prefix. The authors identify Teacher Uncertainty Contraction (TUC) and theoretically analyze its variance‑bias trade‑off, leading to the proposal of Adaptive‑Continuations On‑Policy Distillation (AC‑OPD). Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code generation show that AC‑OPD consistently outperforms standard OPD, with controlled‑continuation and matched‑budget analyses supporting the adaptive‑continuation design.
By Jingang Zhou, Yuyi Zhou, Haiyang Guo, Xukai Wang, Shuai Feng, Sirui Gao, Jian Xu, Qingpei Guo, Xu-Yao Zhang
arXiv:2605. 03677v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for consolidating the capabilities of specialized expert models into a single student model.
By Wenjin Hou, Shangpin Peng, Weinong Wang, Zheng Ruan, Yue Zhang, Zhenglin Zhou, Mingqi Gao, Yifei Chen, Kaiqi Wang, Hongming Yang, Chengquan Zhang, Zhuotao Tian, Han Hu, Yi Yang, Fei Wu, Hehe Fan
arXiv:2609.37044v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Explicit intermediate reasoning gives large language models (LLMs) a stronger problem-solving mode. We study learning from this think-mode advantage vi...
By Wanqi Ren, Jianxiang Wang, Danxuan Liu, Linyi Ding, Yuan Zhang