arXiv:2608. 14728v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an effective paradigm for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student is trained to align its next-token distribution with the teacher's along its own trajectories.
By Huipeng Huang, Hongxin Wei
arXiv:2605. 03677v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for consolidating the capabilities of specialized expert models into a single student model.
By Wenjin Hou, Shangpin Peng, Weinong Wang, Zheng Ruan, Yue Zhang, Zhenglin Zhou, Mingqi Gao, Yifei Chen, Kaiqi Wang, Hongming Yang, Chengquan Zhang, Zhuotao Tian, Han Hu, Yi Yang, Fei Wu, Hehe Fan
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: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 investigates how the sampled-token reverse-KL loss in on‑policy distillation distributes updates across tokens. By analyzing the gradient of the per‑token K2 estimator, the authors find that tokens with low student probability and large teacher‑student gaps receive disproportionately large gradient norms. They propose Surprise‑aware Reweighting (SuRe), a lightweight weighting rule that further amplifies this allocation, and demonstrate that SuRe improves math metrics on Qwen3 student models without harming out‑of‑domain performance.
By Bing Shao, Jiazheng Zhang, Long Ma, Yujiong Shen, Senjie Jin, Xin Guo, Yuming Yang, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
arXiv:2609.38025v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own generated responses using dense, token-level supervision from a stronger teacher. Vanilla OP...
By Zhenyu Wang, Tianze Wang, Linjun Zhang, Yifan Hu
arXiv:2609.36734v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) trains a smaller-capacity student model to imitate a larger-capacity teacher model by matching output distributions, implic...
By Ayan Sengupta, Vaibhav Seth, Tanmoy Chakraborty
On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own generated responses using dense, token-level supervision from a stronger teacher. Vanilla OPD treats all teacher signals equally, assuming that...
arXiv:2606. 00305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) improves large language model reasoning by training a student model on trajectories sampled from its own policy under teacher supervision.
By Yuxuan Jiang, Francis Ferraro
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:2608. 03632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-Policy distillation (OPD) transfers teacher capabilities by supervising student-sampled trajectories with dense token-level teacher signals.
By Yinuo Jiang, Yongjie Ye, Zhou Tao, Xiang Zhuang, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen, Tiankai Li
The paper introduces Selective Supervision for Direct-OPD (S$^2$D-OPD), a refinement of Direct On-Policy Distillation that filters out states where the teacher’s policy change is minimal, as measured by the teacher‑reference Jensen‑Shannon divergence. By masking low‑divergence states and keeping only the top 10% of states per response, S$^2$D-OPD improves held‑out accuracy on AIME and HMMT benchmarks across multiple teacher‑student pairs without additional forward passes.
By Yibo Zhao, Zixuan Yang, Yunshi Lan, Xiang Li