The paper investigates how on-policy distillation (OPD) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can be combined for post‑training reasoning in large language models. It shows that a two‑stage approach—first applying OPD, then RL—outperforms single‑signal methods and other joint baselines on logic and math reasoning benchmarks. The authors explain this advantage through pass@k analysis, learning dynamics, and parameter updates, concluding that OPD expands solution coverage while RL sharpens performance within that support, and that the OPD validation score is the key trigger for switching to RL.
By Boyan Li, Bingsen Chen, Chenghao Yang, Ping Nie, Chen Zhao, Xi Ye
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) provides dense, token-level supervision for reasoning models by aligning a model's own distribution with the distribution it produces under privileged context, typically a verified solution. However, we show that the learning signal drawn from this distributional gap concentrates on style tokens rather than task-bearing ones, as the hinted model tends to produce more direct, shorter outputs.
arXiv:2606. 11709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) provides dense, token-level supervision for reasoning models by aligning a model's own distribution with the distribution it produces under privileged context, typically a verified solution.
By Leyi Pan, Shuchang Tao, Yunpeng Zhai, Lingzhe Zhang, Zhaoyang Liu, Bolin Ding, Aiwei Liu, Lijie Wen
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a powerful recipe for improving language-model reasoning, but it is expensive to repeat on every new strong model because the target model must generate many rollouts during training. As models scale, post-training itself becomes a bottleneck.
arXiv:2609.02817v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for large language model (LLM) post-training, but its reliance...
By Peixuan Han, Runhui Wang, Ketan Ramaneti, Jie Hao, Gerald Friedland, Chris Kong
arXiv:2607. 18955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models on tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation.
By Qiye Cai, Yichuan Ma, Linyang Li, Peiji Li, Yongkang Chen, Qipeng Guo, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Xiaocheng Feng, Bing Qin
arXiv:2602. 22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students.
By Zhaoyang Zhang, Shuli Jiang, Yantao Shen, Yuting Zhang, Dhananjay Ram, Shuo Yang, Zhuowen Tu, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto
arXiv:2607. 05394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a powerful recipe for improving language-model reasoning, but it is expensive to repeat on every new strong model because the target model must generate many rollouts during training.
By Shiyuan Feng, Huan-ang Gao, Haohan Chi, Hanlin Wu, Zhilong Zhang, Zheng Jiang, Bingxiang He, Wei-Ying Ma, Ya-Qin Zhang, Hao Zhou
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
arXiv:2607. 15161v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation is an alternative post-training method in reinforcement learning that alleviates the constraints imposed by reward models by providing token-level supervision from a teacher model.
By Byeongho Heo, Jaehui Hwang, Sangdoo Yun, Dongyoon Han
arXiv:2607. 29209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) broadcasts a single response-level reward to every token, while on-policy distillation (OPD) scores each token against a stronger teacher for a dense advantage but caps performance at teacher quality and discourages exploration beyond it.
By Yifan Ding, Xincheng Wei, Yoshua Y. Li, Ziheng Li, Yuquan Lu, Siyu Zhang, Dongsheng Ma, Rongxiang Weng, Xunliang Cai, Yun Chen
arXiv:2606. 17024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse reward reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard tool for improving LLM reasoning, but its success depends critically on the coverage present in the base model.
By Violet Xiang, Amrith Setlur, Chase Blagden, Nick Haber, Aviral Kumar