arXiv Computation and Language By Wenxi Gan

Learning to Act with Task Progress: Distilling Small Agents from Compact Teacher Supervision

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The paper introduces Task-Progress Distillation (TPD), an offline method that pairs each action in teacher demonstrations with a short label indicating the current task stage. A small 1.7B student model trained with 404 demonstrations using TPD achieves 72.4% mean unseen task success on ALFWorld, matching action-only supervision and outperforming a reasoning-trained student. At lower demonstration budgets, explicit stage labels significantly boost performance, raising success from 48.0% to 67.7% with 200 demos, and both approaches converge to 76.9% with 808 demos.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

State-OPD: State-Grounded On-Policy Distillation for Multi-Turn Agents

State-OPD introduces a state‑grounded on‑policy distillation framework that separates the objective task and action‑observation record from the student’s internal reasoning trajectory. By removing prior student reasoning and resampling complete reasoning‑action responses at high‑entropy states, the method improves teacher supervision and action diversity. Evaluations on ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and WebShop show State‑OPD achieves the highest macro‑average success rates for Qwen3‑1.7B and Qwen3‑4B students, even surpassing a larger teacher model on certain tasks.

By Zhentao Zhang, Yanzhao Zheng, Yanlin Liu, Yuanqiang Yu, Tianze Xu, Chao Ma, Jihuai Zhu, Lelun Wu, Baohua Dong, Hangcheng Zhu, Ruohui Huang, Gang Yu