arXiv AI

SAKI: Maximal-Coupling-Routed Teacher Supervision for On-Policy Distillation

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 AI
Jul 29

Pass the Baton: Trajectory-Relayed On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2607. 26057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) grounds token-level supervision in the student's own trajectory, yet suffers from prefix failure: once the student commits to a wrong reasoning direction, all subsequent generation builds on this deviation, producing misdirected continuations that elicit unreliable supervision and waste compute.

By Haolei Xu, Xiaowen Xu, Haiwen Hong, Zixuan Ni, Hongxing Li, Yiwen Qiu, Weiming Lu, Yongliang Shen
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Step-Level On-Policy Distillation: Interpolating Between On-Policy Distillation and Supervised Fine-Tuning

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
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
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Verify Before You Distill: Prompt-Level Teacher Gating for On-Policy Distillation

The paper introduces Teacher-Gated On-Policy Distillation (TGOPD), a method that verifies teacher reliability at the prompt level before applying dense supervision in on-policy distillation. TGOPD uses verifier-scored teacher probes to decide whether to route a prompt to dense OPD or to a verifier-grounded alternative. Experiments on 4B and 35B models across mathematics, code, and instruction tasks show TGOPD outperforms vanilla OPD and improves teacher GPU utilization from 9.8% to 78.9% in a 4B single-domain run.

By Zhiwei Zhang, Zechen Sun, Fei Zhao, Kang Peng, Bin Liang, Huayu Deng, Yao Hu, Kam-Fai Wong, Mu Chuan
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

SG-OPD: Sign-Gated On-Policy Distillation via Sign-Consistency Gating and Phased Teacher Sampling

arXiv:2606. 09304v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories with dense per-token supervision from a stronger teacher, and often outperforms off-policy distillation and standard reinforcement learning.

By Haoran Xu, Hongyu Wang, Yifei Gao, Jiaze Li, Xiaofeng Zhang, Xiaosong Yuan
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Reward-Gated On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2607. 04037v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation is a powerful way to transfer reasoning ability from a strong teacher to a smaller student: the student samples trajectories from its own policy, and the teacher provides dense token-level supervision on the states the student actually visits.

By Mohammad Sadegh Akhondzadeh, Vijay Lingam, Atula Tejaswi, Chanakya Ekbote, Sujay Sanghavi, Aleksandar Bojchevski