arXiv Machine Learning

Breaking the Tokenizer Barrier: On-Policy Distillation across Model Families

arXiv:2606. 09456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) has become a core technique in the post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs) for transferring knowledge from domain experts to student models.

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 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 Machine Learning
1d ago

Activation-Conditioned Self-Distillation

arXiv:2609.38342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation uses a model as its own teacher to provide dense supervision for reasoning, often through reference-solution conditioning....

By Zhexi Lu, Subhajit Chaudhury, Tejaswini Pedapati, Keerthiram Murugesan, Lei Yu
arXiv AI
2d ago

GFD-OPD: Guidance-Folded On-Policy Distillation of Diffusion Models Across Scales

The paper introduces GFD-OPD, a method for on‑policy distillation of diffusion models that addresses challenges when compressing large teachers into smaller students. It identifies that standard distillation fails due to distribution gaps and classifier‑free guidance amplification, and proposes Fixed‑State KL to measure these gaps. GFD‑OPD reduces the student‑teacher discrepancy and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance across multiple benchmarks.

By Zhenxing Zhang, Jiayan Teng, Wenxu Wu, Zhuoyi Yang, Jiazheng Xu, Wendi Zheng, Jie Tang, Dan Guo, Meng Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Hybrid Policy Distillation for LLMs

arXiv:2604. 20244v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is a powerful paradigm for compressing large language models (LLMs), whose effectiveness depends on intertwined choices of divergence direction, optimization strategy, and data regime.

By Wenhong Zhu, Ruobing Xie, Rui Wang, Pengfei Liu
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Stable On-Policy Distillation through Adaptive Target Reformulation

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