arXiv:2609.14193v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a standard component of frontier post-training pipelines, yet how much its training data actually contributes...
By Gengsheng Li, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Jie Sun, Zeyuan Liu, Ruiqi Liu, Qiyong Zhong, Haiyun Guo, Junfeng Fang, Jinqiao Wang
arXiv:2610.27450v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) can succeed with surprisingly few training questions, motivating a view of questions as carriers of distributional knowled...
By Jiashuo Sun, Hao Zhang, Xueqiang Xu, Heng Wang, Yixuan Xie, Pengcheng Jiang, Zhenrui Yue, Jiajun Fan, Peiran Li, Ge Liu, Shaowen Wang, Jiawei Han
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.
By Zhinan Hou, Jiaqi Zhang, Xunliang Cai, Keyou You
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.
By Yunhe Li, Hao Shi, Wenhao Liu, Mengzhe Ruan, Hanxu Hou, Zhongxiang Dai, Shuang Qiu, Linqi Song
arXiv:2608. 11829v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as a promising post-training technique for enhancing LLM reasoning.
By Xinmu Ge, Zizhuo Zhang, Yu Huang, Jianing Zhu, Lin Yuan, Wanli Gu, Weichang Wu, Weiran Huang, Xiaolu Zhang, Bo Han, Jun Zhou, Jiangchao Yao
The paper investigates on‑policy distillation (OPD) of large language models when trained on a minimal amount of data, specifically a single query. It finds that one‑shot OPD continues to improve for hundreds of steps and recovers most of the performance gains achieved with full‑dataset training across various tasks and model families. The authors attribute this to the high state coverage achieved early in training and show that adding a few semantically distinct queries further boosts coverage and accuracy, eventually matching full‑data results. They conclude that OPD is data‑overfed but algorithm‑starved, highlighting the need to focus on step efficiency and the underlying mechanisms of its recent successes.
By Zixuan Fu, Bingxiang He, Yuxin Zuo, Haohuan Huang, Jinqian Zhang, Ruhang Xiao, Cheng Qian, Qinyu Luo, Huan-ang Gao, Yudong Wang, Zhiyuan Liu, Ning Ding, Chaojun Xiao