The paper introduces Counteraction-Aware Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (CaMOPD), a method designed to recover general capabilities in large language models while preserving domain-specific behavior. CaMOPD tackles two failure modes of standard Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation—conflicting recovery and preservation gradients, and weak correction signals—by using decoupled alternating training and selecting samples with large teacher‑student log‑probability gaps. Experiments on role‑play dialogue and medical reasoning QA show that CaMOPD outperforms baselines in general capability recovery while maintaining domain specialization, and gradient coherence analyses confirm more coherent correction signals.
By Tianlei Chen, Jiao Ou, Ziyuan Liu, Ruiming Tang, Jian Liang, Han Li
The study compares supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) as teacher training methods for on-policy distillation (OPD) in a single-teacher setting. Using Qwen3.5-9B models across Agentic, Reasoning, and Perception domains, RL-trained teachers consistently produce stronger students and better recovery of performance gains than SFT-trained teachers. The authors attribute this advantage to RL teachers’ smaller parameter shifts from the shared initialization, which facilitates learning through OPD.
By Jingyuan Huang, Zuming Huang, Yucheng Shi, Zhongzhi Li, Xiaoming Zhai, Wei Chu, Ninghao Liu
arXiv:2608. 11829v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as a promising post-training technique for enhancing LLM reasoning.
By Xinmu Ge, Zizhuo Zhang, Yu Huang, Jianing Zhu, Lin Yuan, Wanli Gu, Weichang Wu, Weiran Huang, Xiaolu Zhang, Bo Han, Jun Zhou, Jiangchao Yao
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
The paper investigates how privileged information—such as a teacher’s full solution or reasoning trace—affects on‑policy self‑distillation (OPSD) in language models. Using the AMPLE‑Math benchmark, the authors compare distillation with and without extra teacher views, finding that reference‑free distillation explains most gains for Qwen3‑1.7B, while additional references provide modest benefits, especially for polished solutions. The study also shows that the impact of privileged data depends on the student’s training regime and that altering token‑level supervision can leave student behavior largely unchanged.
By XiuYu Zhang, Wei Chow, Junfeng Fang, Zhenkai Liang, Tat-Seng Chua
arXiv:2609.39405v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Task vectors provide a simple mechanism for composing learned capabilities through model merging. However, the composability of task vectors produced b...
By Jingang Zhou, Feiyu Han, Han Zhu, Yuyi Zhou, Ruiyang Zhang, Jian Xu, Sirui Gao, Qingpei Guo, Xu-Yao Zhang
arXiv:2610.20174v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning on Mixed-domain preference data (Mix-RL) has become the mainstream approach for training general-purpose Generative Reward Model...
By Qinglin Su, Licheng Pan, Zhen Fang, Jiakang Wang, Qingnan Ren, Yunsheng Lu, Yan Gao, Zhixuan Chu
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:2610.14001v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) uses a self-teacher conditioned on privileged information to turn the sparse outcome signal of reinforcement learn...
By Yuhang Yang, Mingxuan Xia, Chao Ye, Shuai Zhu, Shouqing Yang, Haobo Wang, Shenzhi Yang, Zhengqing Zang, Chenglong Wang
PMOPD introduces a projection-based approach to multi-teacher on-policy distillation, addressing the capability seesaw problem by constructing subspace memories from task-specific parameter displacements and projecting gradients and optimizer updates to avoid cross-task interference. It also includes a lightweight conflict probe for task interaction analysis, a task ordering strategy, and a cycling mechanism to balance subspace estimation and task revisitation. Experiments on Code, Reason, and Math tasks demonstrate that PMOPD improves all evaluated capabilities, raising average scores by 2.54 points on Qwen2.5-7B and 2.09 points on Llama-3.1-8B.
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a powerful recipe for improving language-model reasoning, but it is expensive to repeat on every new strong model because the target model must generate many rollouts during training. As models scale, post-training itself becomes a bottleneck.
The study compares supervised fine‑tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) as methods for training teacher models that are later merged into a single student via on‑policy distillation (OPD). Across agentic, reasoning, and perception tasks, RL‑trained teachers produce stronger students and better recover teacher performance gains than SFT teachers, both in single‑teacher and multi‑teacher OPD settings. Analysis shows RL teachers deviate less from the shared initialization, leading to faster and higher overlap in teacher–student top‑K predictions, which appears to facilitate more effective OPD learning.
By Jingyuan Huang, Zuming Huang, Yucheng Shi, Zhongzhi Li, Xiaoming Zhai, Wei Chu, Ninghao Liu