arXiv Computation and Language

CROP: Task Relevance via Counterfactuals for Selective On-Policy Distillation

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Adaptive Supervised Anchoring for On-Policy Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608. 07935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) adapts a language model by distilling guidance from a frozen teacher on trajectories sampled from the student.

By Meilin Yang (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Zixuan Ding (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Jianhao Nie (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Weite Zhang (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Yuxin Zhang (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Zhiming Shao (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Li Yu (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Zhe Fu (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China)
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 Computer Vision
Sep 3

CA-OPD: Confidence-Aware On-Policy Distillation for Structured Visual Prediction

CA-OPD is a confidence‑aware on‑policy distillation framework that improves structured visual prediction by using teacher confidence to selectively correct unreliable student transitions and gradually transfer rollout control to the student. The method aligns supervision with intervention decisions, providing direct cross‑entropy loss for corrected tokens and full predictive distribution for retained tokens. In a multi‑teacher setting for GUI grounding and OCR, CA‑OPD significantly outperforms the Qwen3.5‑0.8B baseline, achieving large gains on benchmarks such as ScreenSpot‑Pro and OCRBench‑v2 English.

By Menghao Li, Linjie Mu, Yin Wang, Haotian Hu, Yannian Gu, Lujiayi Xue, Fanyi Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Uni-OPD: Unifying On-Policy Distillation with a Dual-Perspective Recipe

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 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
Aug 6

Privileged, but Biased: How PI-Conditioned Teachers Break Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608. 04794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation (SD) has emerged as a compute-efficient alternative to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards: a self-teacher, conditioned on privileged information (PI) about the answer such as a reference solution, supplies dense per-token supervision to a student that never sees it.

By Sarthak Harne, Chinmay Karkar, Yash Pandya, Ahmed Awadallah, Akshay Nambi
arXiv AI
Aug 24

STAR-OPD: Structured Aspect-Cascade-Aware On-Policy Reward Distillation for ABSA Quadruple Extraction

The paper introduces STAR-OPD, a structured aspect‑cascade‑aware on‑policy reward distillation method for aspect‑based sentiment analysis (ABSA) quadruple extraction. It addresses a specific failure mode where distilled models produce structurally invalid target‑aspect bindings, leading to hallucinated targets and corrupted downstream predictions. By training on student rollouts and applying set‑structured rewards that enforce binding consistency, target grounding, and fine‑grained aspect disambiguation, STAR‑OPD outperforms both off‑policy and generic on‑policy baselines on E‑ABSA20K and SemEval‑2014, reducing target hallucination and improving performance on structurally hard cases.

By Tong Sun, Mingyang Ma, Jiayang Yu