arXiv AI

Unmasking On-Policy Distillation: Where It Helps, Where It Hurts, and Why

arXiv AI
Jun 9

Trajectory-Refined Distillation

arXiv:2606. 08432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a central post-training tool for large language models (LLMs), providing dense per-token teacher supervision along the student's own rollouts.

By Li Jiang, Haoran Xu, Yichuan Ding, Amy Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 3

Purified OPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation Without Losing How to Think

arXiv:2607. 02234v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving LLM reasoning, where a privileged teacher with access to reference solutions provides token-level supervision on the student's own generated trajectories.

By Zhanming Shen, Jintao Tong, Shaotian Yan, Chen Shen, Hao Chen, Wentao Ye, Xiaomeng Hu, Rui Miao, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao, Gang Chen, Jieping Ye
arXiv AI
1d ago

Trajectory Learnability for Offline On-Policy Distillation with Imperfect Teachers

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.

By Yihao Ai, Weilong Yan
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Uni-OPD: Unifying On-Policy Distillation with a Dual-Perspective Recipe

arXiv:2605. 03677v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for consolidating the capabilities of specialized expert models into a single student model.

By Wenjin Hou, Shangpin Peng, Weinong Wang, Zheng Ruan, Yue Zhang, Zhenglin Zhou, Mingqi Gao, Yifei Chen, Kaiqi Wang, Hongming Yang, Chengquan Zhang, Zhuotao Tian, Han Hu, Yi Yang, Fei Wu, Hehe Fan
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Adaptive Supervised Anchoring for On-Policy Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608. 07935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) adapts a language model by distilling guidance from a frozen teacher on trajectories sampled from the student.

By Meilin Yang (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Zixuan Ding (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Jianhao Nie (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Weite Zhang (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Yuxin Zhang (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Zhiming Shao (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Li Yu (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Zhe Fu (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China)
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Step-Level On-Policy Distillation: Interpolating Between On-Policy Distillation and Supervised Fine-Tuning

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
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Cornerstones or Stumbling Blocks? Deciphering the Rock Tokens in On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2605. 09253v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While recent work in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has shown that a small subset of critical tokens disproportionately drives reasoning gains, an analogous token-level understanding of On-Policy Distillation (OPD) remains largely unexplored.

By Yuxuan Jiang, Runchao Li, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Dawei Li, Zhao Yang
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Privileged, but Biased: How PI-Conditioned Teachers Break Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608. 04794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation (SD) has emerged as a compute-efficient alternative to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards: a self-teacher, conditioned on privileged information (PI) about the answer such as a reference solution, supplies dense per-token supervision to a student that never sees it.

By Sarthak Harne, Chinmay Karkar, Yash Pandya, Ahmed Awadallah, Akshay Nambi