On-policy distillation, in which a teacher corrects samples that the student itself generates, presupposes that the two models speak the same language: identical VAE latents, matching architectures, and a common timestep grid. We ask what happens when none of this holds, as when the strongest teacher available and the student one wishes to deploy come from different model families, and find that the standard recipes have no answer: teacher latents cannot serve as targets in a foreign coordinate system, per-pixel losses against a teacher that stochastically re-draws local detail degenerate into blur or divergence, and timestep indices lose their meaning across mismatched schedules.
arXiv:2608. 01263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) samples trajectories from the current student policy and minimizes token-level divergence between student and teacher next-token distributions at prefixes along those trajectories.
By Leyan Xue, Feng Xiong, Mingjun Ma, Changqing Zhang
arXiv:2606. 06021v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) supervises the student only in output space by matching next-token probabilities.
By Shenzhi Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Bowen Song, Haobo Wang, Mingxuan Xia, Xing Zheng, Yingfan Ma, Zhongqi Chen, Weiqiang Wang, Gang Chen
arXiv:2608. 09233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-matching models are now a mainstream method to image generation, but its adaptation to diverse downstream scenarios typically relies on post-training, which may cause conflicts among task-specific optimization objectives.
By Mingfeng Lin, Chengfei Cai, Lin Xu, Yuxiang Wei, Liang Han
arXiv:2606. 29340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a reasoning model on rollouts sampled from its own policy by matching a privileged teacher that also sees verified reference solutions.
By Yuhan Li, Mingxu Zhang, Dazhong Shen, Ying Sun
arXiv:2608. 07068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon agents accumulate growing contexts during interaction, impairing performance and stability.
By Zhiyuan Liu, Tinghong Ye, Chenghao Liu, Yizhuo Li, Songfang Huang
arXiv:2606. 24143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts guided by teacher feedback and is becoming increasingly important for large language model (LLM) post-training.
By Wonjun Kang, Kevin Galim, Seunghyuk Oh, Minjun Kang, Sanghyun Park, Donghoon Kim, Minjae Lee, Minseo Kim, Rishabh Tiwari, Yuchen Zeng, Hyung Il Koo, Kangwook Lee
arXiv:2607. 24731v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) adapts diffusion models by querying a teacher along trajectories generated by the current student, but how it should behave under classifier-free guidance (CFG), a default component of modern diffusion systems, remains poorly understood.
By Bingnan Li, Haozhe Wang, Haozhong Xiong, Fangtai Wu, Jinpeng Yu, Yang Shi, Jiaming Liu, Ruihua Huang
arXiv:2607. 06855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation is a practical post-training recipe for large language models, supplying dense teacher supervision on the student's own trajectories.
By Josip Juki\'c, Ivan Titov
arXiv:2606. 13657v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation (\textsc{OPD}) has recently become a prominent post-training recipe by combining two desirable ingredients: on-policy student trajectories and dense teacher supervision.
By Guo Yu, Wenlin Liu, Yulan Hu, Hao-Xuan Ma, Jun-Peng Jiang, Han-Jia Ye
arXiv:2607. 24522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While on-policy distillation (OPD) effectively addresses sparse rewards and exposure bias in large language model post-training, its extension to flow models remains underexplored.
By Kaiyang Ye, Yuan Ge, Junxiang Zhang, Bei Li, Ziming Zhu, Haishu Zhao, Xiaoqian Liu, Chenglong Wang, Jingbo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
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