arXiv:2606. 01249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) is a fundamental technique for efficient post-training of large language models (LLMs), with broad applications in agent learning, multi-task enhancement, and model compression.
By Xingrun Xing, Haoqing Wang, Boyan Gao, Ziheng Li, Yehui Tang
arXiv:2602. 04879v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm.
By Penghui Qi, Xiangxin Zhou, Zichen Liu, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Min Lin, Wee Sun Lee
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
arXiv:2601. 07155v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely adopted technique for transferring knowledge from large language models to smaller student models; however, conventional supervised KD often suffers from a distribution mismatch between training and inference.
By Ijun Jang, Jewon Yeom, Juan Yeo, Hyunggyu Lim, Taesup Kim
arXiv:2606. 02684v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-Policy distillation (OPD) in large language models is shifting from full-trace KL supervision toward more selective training paradigms.
By Yuying Li, Leqi Zheng, Yongzi Yu, Wenrui Zhou, Xuchang Zhong, Xing Hu, Jing Jin, Huangjie Yuan, Tao Feng
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.
arXiv:2607. 22186v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) accelerates large language model (LLM) post-training by overlapping rollout generation with policy optimization, but the resulting stale, off-policy data can destabilize optimization and ultimately cause policy collapse.
By Guanqun Zhao, Zijun Xie, Binbin Zheng, Enlei Gong, Jiafeng Lu, Yehan Yang, Aoqi Hu, Zeyu Chen
arXiv:2607. 05394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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.
By Shiyuan Feng, Huan-ang Gao, Haohan Chi, Hanlin Wu, Zhilong Zhang, Zheng Jiang, Bingxiang He, Wei-Ying Ma, Ya-Qin Zhang, Hao Zhou
On-Policy distillation (OPD) transfers teacher capabilities by supervising student-sampled trajectories with dense token-level teacher signals. Recent selective OPD methods improve this process by prioritizing signals that are confident, informative, or learnable.
arXiv:2607. 28582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising approach to improve reasoning language models, but it remains brittle in practice: making it work reliably often requires substantial engineering effort.
By Jiawei Xu, Minghui Liu, Juzheng Zhang, Tom Goldstein, Furong Huang
arXiv:2608.23311v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Policy optimization (PO) for Large Language Models faces a stability--exploration trade-off, currently mediated by an action-side Policy-KL regularizer...
By Xianlei Zhou, Xiangdi Meng, Yu He, Tianyu Qi, Shuyan Guan, Xianli Zhang, Jian Zhang, Xin Li, Qika Lin, Jun Liu
SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents proposes a new framework that adaptively reweights distillation strength at each reasoning step based on step-level divergence. This approach mitigates cascading errors in tool-integrated reasoning by attenuating misleading teacher signals in high-divergence regions while preserving dense guidance where student and teacher align. Experiments on math, science, and code benchmarks show up to 20.86% improvement over the second-best baseline, with a 0.6B student scoring 26.13% on AIME 2025.
By Qiyong Zhong, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Xin Lin, Jie Sun, Houcheng Jiang, Xiang Wang, Junfeng Fang