arXiv Machine Learning

DUET: Dual-Teacher On-Policy Distillation via Same-Weight Disagreement for Prohibition Compliance

arXiv:2608. 14644v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world LLM deployments increasingly rely on runtime-injected prohibitions--enterprise policies, PII redlines, tool boundaries--that vary per request and per tenant.

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
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Trajectory-Refined Distillation

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 Machine Learning
Sep 24

Counterfactual Constraint-Conditioned On-Policy Distillation for Multi-Constraint Instruction Following

arXiv:2609.27421v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-constraint instruction following requires a model to respond to a query under many simultaneously active constraints. Even strong instruction-tun...

By Yanzhao Zheng, Yuanqiang Yu, Tianze Xu, Chao Ma, Zhentao Zhang, Jihuai Zhu, Baohua Dong, Hangcheng Zhu, Ruohui Huang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
5d ago

EOPSA: Efficient On-Policy Self-Distilled Safety Alignment

EOPSA (Efficient On-Policy Self-Distilled Safety Alignment) addresses inefficiencies in On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) for safety alignment by focusing training on safety-critical tokens. It introduces Adaptive Rollout Scheduling, which limits generation length based on a Teacher Rescue Rate metric, and Selective Distillation, which filters out safety-neutral tokens to concentrate gradient updates on safety-pivotal transitions. Experiments on models up to 32B parameters show that EOPSA reduces rollout computation by about 50% and backpropagates through only roughly 2% of tokens, outperforming full-token distillation baselines in safety compliance and reasoning retention.

arXiv AI
Jul 3

DemoPSD: Disagreement-Modulated Policy Self-Distillation

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.

By Yunhe Li, Hao Shi, Wenhao Liu, Mengzhe Ruan, Hanxu Hou, Zhongxiang Dai, Shuang Qiu, Linqi Song
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

Does On-Policy Distillation Really Distill? From Noisy Teacher to Self-Improvement

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.

By Yi Ding, Ruqi Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 2

SCOPE: Signal-Calibrated On-Policy Distillation Enhancement with Dual-Path Adaptive Weighting

arXiv:2604. 10688v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for reasoning alignment in large language models, yet its sparse, outcome-level rewards make token-level credit assignment notoriously difficult.

By Binbin Zheng, Xing Ma, Yiheng Liang, Jingqing Ruan, Xiaoliang Fu, Kepeng Lin, Benchang Zhu, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Beyond Teacher Likelihood: Group-Calibrated On-Policy Distillation for Long-Context Reasoning

The paper introduces Group‑Calibrated On‑Policy Distillation (GC‑OPD), a method that aligns token‑level teacher guidance with trajectory‑level verifier rewards for long‑context reasoning tasks. GC‑OPD normalizes rewards within rollout groups, uses the signed teacher‑verifier disagreement as a residual, and distributes this residual across tokens via Relative‑Advantage‑Based Credit Assignment (RACA). Experiments on five long‑context benchmarks show that GC‑OPD improves Qwen3‑4B and Qwen3‑8B checkpoints from 29.08/35.12 to 40.47/44.65, outperforming vanilla OPD and demonstrating the effectiveness of group‑relative residual calibration.

By Zhu Zhang, Jixun Wang, Xiaoang Xu, Xiaorong Wang, Zihan Zhou, Zhiyuan Wang, Shuo Wang, Chaojun Xiao, Yuezhi Zhou