arXiv:2609.14636v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a standard approach for transferring capabilities from large teachers to compact students. Its cost, however, i...
By Zhiyu Gui, Kexin Huang, Jia Guo, Junkang Wu, Zihao Wang, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang
The paper introduces SCOUT, a co‑training framework that adapts an off‑policy teacher to better continue from student‑generated prefixes in on‑policy distillation (OPD). By periodically optimizing the teacher’s conditional continuation ability using reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, SCOUT improves the teacher’s performance on student prefixes. Experiments across various teacher‑student setups, model scales, and reasoning domains show that SCOUT consistently enhances the effectiveness of OPD.
By Langlin Huang, Hao Liu, Mononito Goswami, Xinyu Li, Prithwith Jana, Nikos Kanakaris, Patrick Bl\"obaum, Purak Jain
arXiv:2609.37898v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning for long-horizon agents typically relies on sparse outcome-based rewards. This leads to a severe cold-start problem, as early-st...
By Youling Huang, Tiankuo Xu, Jiaji Liu, Tong Zheng, Shuo Zhou, Shaotong Qi, Junchi Yao, Shiyang Liu, Hao Xu, Pengcheng Xu, Bo Huang, Hongyi Fu, Lin Lin
arXiv:2609.37915v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a student to match a privileged teacher distribution along its own sampled trajectory. Standard OPSD applies...
By Md. Ismail Hossain, Humaira Kousar, Isidora Chara Tourni
arXiv:2607. 05804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student policy by matching a stronger teacher on the student's own trajectories, offering a promising framework for language agent training.
By Yuhang Zhou, Kai Zheng, Haoling Li, Dengyun Peng, Can Xu, Jingjing Chen
arXiv:2606. 24143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts guided by teacher feedback and is becoming increasingly important for large language model (LLM) post-training.
By Wonjun Kang, Kevin Galim, Seunghyuk Oh, Minjun Kang, Sanghyun Park, Donghoon Kim, Minjae Lee, Minseo Kim, Rishabh Tiwari, Yuchen Zeng, Hyung Il Koo, Kangwook Lee