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:2608. 01263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) samples trajectories from the current student policy and minimizes token-level divergence between student and teacher next-token distributions at prefixes along those trajectories.
By Leyan Xue, Feng Xiong, Mingjun Ma, Changqing Zhang
arXiv:2606. 06021v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) supervises the student only in output space by matching next-token probabilities.
By Shenzhi Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Bowen Song, Haobo Wang, Mingxuan Xia, Xing Zheng, Yingfan Ma, Zhongqi Chen, Weiqiang Wang, Gang Chen
arXiv:2608. 09233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-matching models are now a mainstream method to image generation, but its adaptation to diverse downstream scenarios typically relies on post-training, which may cause conflicts among task-specific optimization objectives.
By Mingfeng Lin, Chengfei Cai, Lin Xu, Yuxiang Wei, Liang Han
arXiv:2606. 29340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a reasoning model on rollouts sampled from its own policy by matching a privileged teacher that also sees verified reference solutions.
By Yuhan Li, Mingxu Zhang, Dazhong Shen, Ying Sun
arXiv:2608. 07068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon agents accumulate growing contexts during interaction, impairing performance and stability.
By Zhiyuan Liu, Tinghong Ye, Chenghao Liu, Yizhuo Li, Songfang Huang