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: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
The paper introduces a method for offline on‑policy distillation that addresses the problem of imperfect teacher supervision. By training on teacher‑successful problems and measuring changes in token likelihoods on teacher‑failed trajectories, the authors derive a learnability signal that weights the distillation loss. This approach improves performance on mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks while reducing computational cost compared to online distillation.
By Yihao Ai, Weilong Yan
Offline on-policy distillation gains efficiency by collecting student trajectories and teacher supervision once and reusing them throughout optimization. The same reuse makes imperfect supervision per...
The paper introduces TISD, a trajectory-intervention self-distillation method that forces a teacher-selected branch action and then lets the student generate the suffix, distilling the full trajectory under a privileged-context-conditioned teacher. This approach addresses a data-collection bottleneck in on‑policy self‑distillation by exposing successor contexts that the student would otherwise miss. Experiments on coding and science domains show modest but consistent improvements in average performance metrics compared to baseline methods.
By Taeckyung Lee, Rinat Amankos, Jeonghye Kim, Hyungjun Yoon, Woogyeol Jin, Sung-Ju Lee
arXiv:2609.36246v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present OLIVE (OnLine InterVEntion). At each iteration, the evolving student policy generates a new prefix, the teacher continues it autoregressivel...
By Haojin Wang, Dylan Zhang, Huaibo Chen, Suhao Yu, Yihang Sun, Zhanyang Jin, Jiaying Ye, Dianqi Li, Prasanna Sattigeri, Kamal Youcef-Toumi, Hao Peng
arXiv:2606. 00305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) improves large language model reasoning by training a student model on trajectories sampled from its own policy under teacher supervision.
By Yuxuan Jiang, Francis Ferraro
arXiv:2609.37500v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains language models using dense token-level teacher supervision on student-generated trajectories. However, its relianc...
By Yuxiao Yang, Shangzhe Li, Tianrun Yu, Kaixiang Zhao, Taylor W. Killian, Weitong 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
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
arXiv:2606. 15912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-turn agents that plan, invoke tools, and interact with environments offer a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks, yet their capabilities typically rely on very large models whose inference cost is prohibitive in practice.
By Gengsheng Li, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Ruiqi Liu, Tianyu Yang, Jie Sun, Qiyong Zhong, Haiyun Guo, Junfeng Fang, Dan Zhang, Jinqiao Wang
arXiv:2609.38342v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation uses a model as its own teacher to provide dense supervision for reasoning, often through reference-solution conditioning....
By Zhexi Lu, Subhajit Chaudhury, Tejaswini Pedapati, Keerthiram Murugesan, Lei Yu