The paper investigates on‑policy distillation (OPD) for large language models, showing that OPD learns not only which tokens to consider but also where to keep reasoning paths open. It introduces the entropy shape—a sequence of next‑token entropies—to capture this "where to branch" aspect and proposes the Entropy Shape Correlation (ESC) metric to measure student‑teacher agreement. By tracking ESC during training and adjusting a teacher’s entropy while preserving token preferences, the authors demonstrate that controlling where to branch causally drives OPD gains, and they establish a teacher‑selection protocol where pre‑OPD ESC predicts the best teacher more accurately than existing methods.
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: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.
E$^2$-OPSD tackles a failure mode in on‑policy self‑distillation where the student’s token entropy surpasses the teacher’s, a problem called entropy overshoot. The method replaces the teacher’s answer with a retrieved solved neighboring problem to provide transferable reasoning guidance and uses the student‑teacher entropy gap to adjust token corrections. These changes improve math reasoning scores by up to 4.3 points in mean@16 and yield out‑of‑domain gains of up to 4.9 points in mean@16 and 5.5 points in pass@8, all without extra forward passes or networks.
arXiv:2607. 02502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has emerged as a practical method for training large language models (LLMs) to reason, where a single model acts as both the teacher and the student with different levels of information access.
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.
arXiv:2610.08448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own generations using teacher feedback. With different tokenizers, comparing teacher and student...
The paper investigates data efficiency and selection in On‑Policy Distillation (OPD) for large language models. It shows that 1‑shot OPD—training on a single example—consistently improves performance, especially when the example is hard, and that longer chain‑of‑thought (CoT) paths drive the gains rather than token entropy. Based on these findings, the authors propose a simple hard‑example selection strategy that, using only eight carefully chosen hard examples, matches the performance of a 17,000‑example baseline across models from 1.5B to 7B parameters.
arXiv:2606. 09456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) has become a core technique in the post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs) for transferring knowledge from domain experts to student models.
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...
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.
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.
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.