The paper introduces RouteOPD, a new on‑policy distillation method that treats teacher‑student disagreement as a probability transport problem. By decomposing disagreement into excess sources and deficit destinations, RouteOPD pairs them explicitly and optimizes pairwise log‑odds toward targets derived from a bounded teacher potential. Experiments on four teacher‑student configurations and four mathematical‑reasoning benchmarks show that RouteOPD consistently outperforms sampled reverse‑KL OPD, achieving higher routing fidelity and lower background leakage.
arXiv:2608. 04419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) provides dense teacher supervision on student-generated trajectories, but standard reverse-KL training can assign insufficient probability to other plausible continuations.
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...
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.
arXiv:2606. 10369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) continue to scale, it becomes increasingly challenging to grow model capacity under fixed computation budgets.
Offline on-policy distillation gains efficiency by collecting student trajectories and teacher supervision once and reusing them throughout optimization. The same reuse makes imperfect supervision per...
arXiv:2608. 08726v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) uses a privileged teacher to supervise a reasoning model on prefixes sampled from its own rollouts.
arXiv:2608. 01953v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) provides teacher supervision on states visited by the student, reducing the distribution gap between training and inference.
The paper introduces a method for offline on‑policy distillation that addresses the problem of imperfect teacher supervision. By training on teacher‑successful problems and measuring changes in token likelihoods on teacher‑failed trajectories, the authors derive a learnability signal that weights the distillation loss. This approach improves performance on mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks while reducing computational cost compared to online distillation.
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:2607. 04037v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation is a powerful way to transfer reasoning ability from a strong teacher to a smaller student: the student samples trajectories from its own policy, and the teacher provides dense token-level supervision on the states the student actually visits.
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.
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.