arXiv Machine Learning
From Dissonance to Orchestration: Teacher Intervention in On-Policy Distillation
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Step-Level On-Policy Distillation: Interpolating Between On-Policy Distillation and Supervised Fine-Tuning
arXiv:2608. 16333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) aligns a student model with a teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories.
arXiv AI
Sep 4
Verify Before You Distill: Prompt-Level Teacher Gating for On-Policy Distillation
The paper introduces Teacher-Gated On-Policy Distillation (TGOPD), a method that verifies teacher reliability at the prompt level before applying dense supervision in on-policy distillation. TGOPD uses verifier-scored teacher probes to decide whether to route a prompt to dense OPD or to a verifier-grounded alternative. Experiments on 4B and 35B models across mathematics, code, and instruction tasks show TGOPD outperforms vanilla OPD and improves teacher GPU utilization from 9.8% to 78.9% in a 4B single-domain run.
arXiv AI
3d ago
On the Off-Policy Teacher in On-Policy Distillation
The paper introduces SCOUT, a co‑training framework that adapts an off‑policy teacher to better continue from student‑generated prefixes in on‑policy distillation (OPD). By periodically optimizing the teacher’s conditional continuation ability using reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, SCOUT improves the teacher’s performance on student prefixes. Experiments across various teacher‑student setups, model scales, and reasoning domains show that SCOUT consistently enhances the effectiveness of OPD.
arXiv Machine Learning
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Prefix-Guided On-Policy Distillation: Mining Golden Trajectories from Rollouts
arXiv:2606. 21994v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) improves reasoning models by applying dense teacher supervision on student-sampled trajectories.
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 17
Step-Level On-Policy Distillation: Interpolating Between On-Policy Distillation and Supervised Fine-Tuning
On-policy distillation (OPD) aligns a student model with a teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories. This approach has achieved strong empirical gains and can often surpass conve...
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31
VISTA: Verifier-Informed Student-to-Teacher Adaptation for On-Policy Self-Distillation
The paper introduces VISTA, a method that enhances on‑policy self‑distillation (OPSD) by adapting the teacher model toward the student’s distribution using outcome‑verified rollouts. VISTA keeps the standard OPSD student update but selectively adjusts the teacher only on the top‑k positions with the largest teacher‑student KL divergence, without adding new sampling or reward objectives. Experiments on AIME24, AIME25, and HMMT25 with Qwen3 models show that VISTA outperforms OPSD across all scales, improving Avg@12 by up to 2.1 points.