Latent-MOPD is a new on‑policy distillation method that allows a single large language model student to learn from multiple specialist teachers by using both the teachers’ output distributions and their hidden state representations. The approach selects late‑layer targets based on teacher‑student relationships, bridges hidden width differences with a shared projection, and groups updates by domain, enabling gradual shift from representation to token supervision. Experiments show that Latent‑MOPD outperforms token‑only, representation‑only, and uniform‑averaging baselines across nine benchmarks in math, code, and logic, and even surpasses the best individual teacher on most tasks.
arXiv:2610.02324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation multimodal large language models are designed to support a broad spectrum of capabilities across diverse domains. Multi-teacher on-policy...
arXiv:2606. 30406v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) rely on reinforcement learning during post-training to push specific capabilities, yet integrating multiple capabilities into one model remains hard.
arXiv:2606. 06021v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) supervises the student only in output space by matching next-token probabilities.
arXiv:2609.36546v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its self-generated trajectories with dense token-level teacher feedback. However, naive OPD ma...
arXiv:2610.08398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation from multiple teachers combines expertise from different domains in a single student, but conflicting gradients can hinder this...
The paper introduces Selective Supervision for Direct-OPD (S$^2$D-OPD), a refinement of Direct On-Policy Distillation that filters out states where the teacher’s policy change is minimal, as measured by the teacher‑reference Jensen‑Shannon divergence. By masking low‑divergence states and keeping only the top 10% of states per response, S$^2$D-OPD improves held‑out accuracy on AIME and HMMT benchmarks across multiple teacher‑student pairs without additional forward passes.
arXiv:2607. 26246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns a student with the teacher's token-level distribution on the student's own rollouts, is an effective paradigm for transferring capabilities across LLMs.
MOPD‑Router rethinks teacher routing in multi‑teacher on‑policy distillation by routing supervision over the full teacher pool at each token, eliminating the need for prompt‑level domain labels or a separate routing model. The framework offers a plug‑in interface for various metrics, and introduces ExpertAlign, which scores teachers based on how well their corrections reflect their specialized post‑training knowledge. Experiments on both unlabeled and domain‑labeled mixtures show that ExpertAlign outperforms existing methods, improving overall scores by up to 12.3% on unlabeled data and 7.8% on domain‑labeled data. whyItMatters":"Token‑level routing enables the use of complementary supervision across domains without relying on domain labels, leading to significant performance gains in multi‑teacher distillation settings."
On-policy distillation, in which a teacher corrects samples that the student itself generates, presupposes that the two models speak the same language: identical VAE latents, matching architectures, and a common timestep grid. We ask what happens when none of this holds, as when the strongest teacher available and the student one wishes to deploy come from different model families, and find that the standard recipes have no answer: teacher latents cannot serve as targets in a foreign coordinate system, per-pixel losses against a teacher that stochastically re-draws local detail degenerate into blur or divergence, and timestep indices lose their meaning across mismatched schedules.
arXiv:2609.24646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation fine-tuning (SDFT) learns new skills from demonstrations while reducing forgetting, but it always distils toward the full d...
The paper introduces D$^3$-MOPD, a dynamic domain scheduling method for multi-teacher on‑policy distillation. It adapts the domain mixture during training by monitoring each domain’s reverse‑KL trajectory, thereby allocating more compute to slower‑converging domains and less to those that plateau early. Experiments on a Qwen3.6‑35B‑A3B student show that D$^3$-MOPD closes 97% of the student‑to‑teacher performance gap, matches peak performance with roughly three times fewer rollout steps, and outperforms specialist teachers on most benchmarks.
arXiv:2608. 03316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation, in which a teacher corrects samples that the student itself generates, presupposes that the two models speak the same language: identical VAE latents, matching architectures, and a common timestep grid.