arXiv AI By Huan-ang Gao, Haohan Chi, Yong Yan, Shiyuan Feng, Hanlin Wu, Zheng Jiang, Bingxiang He, Wei-Ying Ma, Ya-Qin Zhang, Hao Zhou

Open-MOPD: Diagnosing and Fixing Capability Imbalance in Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation

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Open-MOPD addresses the capability imbalance problem in multi-teacher on-policy distillation (M-OPD) by isolating capability integration from routing ambiguity and revealing a 35.6% headroom gap compared to a domain-routed oracle ensemble. The study identifies three key factors—sequence-length disparities, convergence drift, and reward staleness—that misallocate token-level optimization budgets, leading to severe degradation in concise tasks. The proposed Open-MOPD framework introduces token-share balancing, gap-aware dynamic budget allocation, and student reward refresh, boosting headroom recovery to 83.4% and providing an open-source, reproducible post‑training recipe and evaluation suite.

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