The paper introduces D$^3$-MOPD, a dynamic domain scheduling method for multi-teacher on‑policy distillation. It adapts the domain mixture during training by monitoring each domain’s reverse‑KL trajectory, thereby allocating more compute to slower‑converging domains and less to those that plateau early. Experiments on a Qwen3.6‑35B‑A3B student show that D$^3$-MOPD closes 97% of the student‑to‑teacher performance gap, matches peak performance with roughly three times fewer rollout steps, and outperforms specialist teachers on most benchmarks.
By Zechen Sun, Zhiwei Zhang, Fei Zhao, Juntao Li, Mu Chuan, Huayu Deng, Guojian Zhan, Wenliang Chen, Yao Hu, Min Zhang
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
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:2609.36546v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its self-generated trajectories with dense token-level teacher feedback. However, naive OPD ma...
By Shutong Wu, Xiwen Chen, Brendan Rappazzo, Daiheng Zhang, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Jiawei Zhang
MOPD‑Router rethinks teacher routing in multi‑teacher on‑policy distillation by routing supervision over the full teacher pool at each token, eliminating the need for prompt‑level domain labels or a separate routing model. The framework offers a plug‑in interface for various metrics, and introduces ExpertAlign, which scores teachers based on how well their corrections reflect their specialized post‑training knowledge. Experiments on both unlabeled and domain‑labeled mixtures show that ExpertAlign outperforms existing methods, improving overall scores by up to 12.3% on unlabeled data and 7.8% on domain‑labeled data.
whyItMatters":"Token‑level routing enables the use of complementary supervision across domains without relying on domain labels, leading to significant performance gains in multi‑teacher distillation settings."
By Tianze Xu, Yanzhao Zheng, Zhentao Zhang, Yuanqiang Yu, Chao Ma, Jihuai Zhu, Lelun Wu, Lyumanshan Ye, Pengfei Liu, Baohua Dong, Hangcheng Zhu, Ruohui Huang, Gang Yu
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