On-policy distillation (OPD) provides teacher supervision on states visited by the student, reducing the distribution gap between training and inference. However, in multi-turn agentic tasks, student deviations may accumulate over time, gradually moving the trajectory away from states where teacher guidance remains effective.
arXiv:2606. 15912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-turn agents that plan, invoke tools, and interact with environments offer a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks, yet their capabilities typically rely on very large models whose inference cost is prohibitive in practice.
By Gengsheng Li, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Ruiqi Liu, Tianyu Yang, Jie Sun, Qiyong Zhong, Haiyun Guo, Junfeng Fang, Dan Zhang, Jinqiao Wang
On-policy distillation (OPD) aligns a student model with a teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories. This approach has achieved strong empirical gains and can often surpass conve...
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
The paper introduces Teacher-Gated On-Policy Distillation (TGOPD), a method that verifies teacher reliability at the prompt level before applying dense supervision in on-policy distillation. TGOPD uses verifier-scored teacher probes to decide whether to route a prompt to dense OPD or to a verifier-grounded alternative. Experiments on 4B and 35B models across mathematics, code, and instruction tasks show TGOPD outperforms vanilla OPD and improves teacher GPU utilization from 9.8% to 78.9% in a 4B single-domain run.
By Zhiwei Zhang, Zechen Sun, Fei Zhao, Kang Peng, Bin Liang, Huayu Deng, Yao Hu, Kam-Fai Wong, Mu Chuan
arXiv:2609.37522v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains compact language agents with teacher feedback on student-generated trajectories. In multi-turn tasks, compounding e...
By Xiaohan Yi, Wen Luo, Yani Huang, Junfeng Zhan, Asher Qin, Peilin Zhao, Xi Xiao
arXiv:2609.14636v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a standard approach for transferring capabilities from large teachers to compact students. Its cost, however, i...
By Zhiyu Gui, Kexin Huang, Jia Guo, Junkang Wu, Zihao Wang, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang
arXiv:2606. 09304v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories with dense per-token supervision from a stronger teacher, and often outperforms off-policy distillation and standard reinforcement learning.
By Haoran Xu, Hongyu Wang, Yifei Gao, Jiaze Li, Xiaofeng Zhang, Xiaosong Yuan
The paper introduces TISD, a trajectory-intervention self-distillation method that forces a teacher-selected branch action and then lets the student generate the suffix, distilling the full trajectory under a privileged-context-conditioned teacher. This approach addresses a data-collection bottleneck in on‑policy self‑distillation by exposing successor contexts that the student would otherwise miss. Experiments on coding and science domains show modest but consistent improvements in average performance metrics compared to baseline methods.
By Taeckyung Lee, Rinat Amankos, Jeonghye Kim, Hyungjun Yoon, Woogyeol Jin, Sung-Ju Lee
arXiv:2609.37510v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own reasoning trajectories using feedback from a stronger teacher. Teacher interventions can imp...
By Yuhao Wang, Ruiyang Ren, Yinan Zhang, Ruiqing Zhang, Jing Liu, Chunyan Miao
arXiv:2608. 05219v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Privileged on-policy distillation provides dense supervision for multi-turn agents by allowing a synchronized teacher to re-score the student's response at every turn with access to training-only references, such as successful trajectories.
By Junzhuo Liu, Weiwei Li, Jun Ling, Peng Wang
arXiv:2607. 26057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) grounds token-level supervision in the student's own trajectory, yet suffers from prefix failure: once the student commits to a wrong reasoning direction, all subsequent generation builds on this deviation, producing misdirected continuations that elicit unreliable supervision and waste compute.
By Haolei Xu, Xiaowen Xu, Haiwen Hong, Zixuan Ni, Hongxing Li, Yiwen Qiu, Weiming Lu, Yongliang Shen