Data-free On-policy Distillation
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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arXiv:2607. 02502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has emerged as a practical method for training large language models (LLMs) to reason, where a single model acts as both the teacher and the student with different levels of information access.
The paper investigates how privileged information—such as a teacher’s full solution or reasoning trace—affects on‑policy self‑distillation (OPSD) in language models. Using the AMPLE‑Math benchmark, the authors compare distillation with and without extra teacher views, finding that reference‑free distillation explains most gains for Qwen3‑1.7B, while additional references provide modest benefits, especially for polished solutions. The study also shows that the impact of privileged data depends on the student’s training regime and that altering token‑level supervision can leave student behavior largely unchanged.
arXiv:2609.21619v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) improves reasoning models by learning the token-level discrepancy between a stronger teacher and an on-policy student. How...
On-policy distillation trains a language model on its own generations while a teacher scores them token by token. It combines the dense supervision of imitation learning with the on-policy sampling of...
arXiv:2608. 11829v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as a promising post-training technique for enhancing LLM reasoning.
The paper investigates data efficiency and selection in On‑Policy Distillation (OPD) for large language models. It shows that 1‑shot OPD—training on a single example—consistently improves performance, especially when the example is hard, and that longer chain‑of‑thought (CoT) paths drive the gains rather than token entropy. Based on these findings, the authors propose a simple hard‑example selection strategy that, using only eight carefully chosen hard examples, matches the performance of a 17,000‑example baseline across models from 1.5B to 7B parameters.