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: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
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
The paper introduces a recursive self-improvement framework for language models that replaces an external teacher with a frozen copy of the student, enabling dynamic co-evolution (DCE) and self-refined concise learning (SRCL). DCE allows the privileged teacher to evolve alongside the student, while SRCL trains on shorter, verified rewrites to reduce verbosity. Experiments show that the combined DCE+SRCL approach outperforms traditional on‑policy self‑distillation across multiple model sizes and math benchmarks, achieving significant accuracy gains and shorter outputs.
By Shangjian Yin, Zehao Zhao, Kavosh Asadi, Rui Liu, Yuchen Lu, Shike Mei, Hang Cui, Luke Simon, Zhouxing Shi, Hamed Firooz
arXiv:2606. 22600v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) improves the learning efficiency of standard reinforcement learning through dense, token-level supervision from teachers.
By Yan Xie, Sijie Zhu, Tiansheng Wen, Bo Chen, Yifei Wang
arXiv:2606. 21994v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) improves reasoning models by applying dense teacher supervision on student-sampled trajectories.
By Qingfei Zhao, Huan Song, Shuyu Tian, Jiawei Shao, Xuelong Li
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...
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:2605.10889v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: On-policy distillation offers dense, per-token supervision for training reasoning models; however, it remains unclear under which conditions...
By Mohammadreza Armandpour, Fatih Ilhan, David Harrison, Ajay Jaiswal, Duc N. M Hoang, Fartash Faghri, Yizhe Zhang, Minsik Cho, Mehrdad Farajtabar
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:2608.29846v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Sampled-token on-policy distillation (OPD) efficiently transfers capabilities from teacher to student using student-generated tokens, requiring teach...
By Run Yang, Runpeng Dai, Jie Sun, Jielei Zhang, Fan Zhou, Hongtu Zhu, Peiyi Li, Longwen Gao
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