arXiv Machine Learning

Demystifying On-Policy Distillation: Roles, Pathologies, and Regulations

arXiv:2607. 13399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a key paradigm in LLM post-training, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

Cornerstones or Stumbling Blocks? Deciphering the Rock Tokens in On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2605. 09253v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While recent work in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has shown that a small subset of critical tokens disproportionately drives reasoning gains, an analogous token-level understanding of On-Policy Distillation (OPD) remains largely unexplored.

By Yuxuan Jiang, Runchao Li, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Dawei Li, Zhao Yang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

RLCSD: Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive On-Policy Self-Distillation

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

RLCSD: Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive On-Policy Self-Distillation

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 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 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 11

SR-OPSD: Self-Referenced On-Policy Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608. 09745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) converts feedback into dense token-level supervision on trajectories generated by the policy to be optimized, providing a useful complement to reinforcement learning with sparse outcome rewards.

By Zhuo Sun, Entong Li, Yanlong Zhao, Xiaoyuan Cheng, Wenxuan Yuan, Kaiyu Li, Che Liu, Huihang Liu, Harrison Bo Hua Zhu, Li Zeng