Beyond Policy Discrepancy: Capability-Aware Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation
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arXiv:2610.02324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation multimodal large language models are designed to support a broad spectrum of capabilities across diverse domains. Multi-teacher on-policy...
The paper introduces Cross-Teacher Guarding for Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (Road MOPD), a method that adds non-routed teachers as auxiliary cross-domain critics to address gradient conflicts in multi-teacher distillation. It employs token-level credit assignment based on teacher agreement and preventive gradient projection to coordinate updates and reduce conflicts. Experiments show that Road MOPD improves performance, especially in high-conflict scenarios, and mitigates degradation in disadvantaged domains.
arXiv:2606. 30626v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) offers superior capacity transfer by supervising student-sampled trajectories with dense token-level signals.
arXiv:2606. 30406v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) rely on reinforcement learning during post-training to push specific capabilities, yet integrating multiple capabilities into one model remains hard.
Latent-MOPD is a new on‑policy distillation method that allows a single large language model student to learn from multiple specialist teachers by using both the teachers’ output distributions and their hidden state representations. The approach selects late‑layer targets based on teacher‑student relationships, bridges hidden width differences with a shared projection, and groups updates by domain, enabling gradual shift from representation to token supervision. Experiments show that Latent‑MOPD outperforms token‑only, representation‑only, and uniform‑averaging baselines across nine benchmarks in math, code, and logic, and even surpasses the best individual teacher on most tasks.
arXiv:2609.08798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Weak-to-strong generalization asks whether stronger models can learn from weaker supervisors and surpass them. This question is particularly important...