arXiv Machine Learning
1% of Tokens Can Be Enough: On Gradient Estimation in On-Policy Distillation
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
Related stories
arXiv Statistics ML
6d ago
Unbiased Top-$k$ Estimation for On-Policy Distillation
The paper introduces Tail‑Corrected Top‑k On‑Policy Distillation (TT‑OPD), a method that improves on existing Top‑k OPD by combining the selected top‑k tokens with a sampled token from the student’s rollout. This hybrid approach recovers the probability mass discarded by limiting to top‑k, yielding an unbiased estimator of the reverse KL divergence gradient while maintaining low computational cost. Experiments show TT‑OPD outperforms other OPD variants in accuracy.
arXiv AI
Jun 24
On the Position Bias of On-Policy Distillation
arXiv:2606. 22600v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) improves the learning efficiency of standard reinforcement learning through dense, token-level supervision from teachers.
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.
arXiv AI
Sep 7
Extremely Sparse Supervision Incentivizes Reasoning Ability
The paper reports that in on‑policy distillation for large language models, reasoning performance can be improved by supervising only a tiny fraction of generated tokens—sometimes just one or two tokens per reasoning trajectory, about 0.05% of all tokens. This sparse supervision consistently matches or exceeds full‑token training across nine teacher‑student setups on mathematical reasoning, and is also validated on coding reasoning, Llama models, and PPO‑based reinforcement learning with verifiable reward. The findings suggest that effective post‑training does not require token‑intensive supervision and may align more closely with natural learning processes that focus on critical reasoning steps.
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.
arXiv AI
Jun 3
Filter, Then Reweight: Rethinking Optimization Granularity in On-Policy Distillation
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.