The paper investigates on‑policy distillation (OPD), showing that teacher supervision during OPD contains significant noise that grows with teacher size, yet the student policy remains largely unaffected by this noise. It finds that OPD’s gains stem mainly from suppressing low‑log‑probability tokens, a process that can be replicated without a teacher. Building on this insight, the authors propose On‑Policy Self‑Adaptation (OPSA), a supervision‑free method that uses entropy‑adaptive negative advantages to improve performance on several benchmarks, outperforming both the base model and OPD.
By Yi Ding, Ruqi Zhang
arXiv:2606. 24084v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student policy using teacher signals computed on trajectories sampled by the student itself.
By Liwen Zheng, Haiyun Jiang
arXiv:2604. 10688v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for reasoning alignment in large language models, yet its sparse, outcome-level rewards make token-level credit assignment notoriously difficult.
By Binbin Zheng, Xing Ma, Yiheng Liang, Jingqing Ruan, Xiaoliang Fu, Kepeng Lin, Benchang Zhu, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai
Offline on-policy distillation gains efficiency by collecting student trajectories and teacher supervision once and reusing them throughout optimization. The same reuse makes imperfect supervision per...
arXiv:2609.17474v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) distillation aims to transfer the capabilities of a powerful teacher to a smaller student. Direct imitation, however, can...
By Haichen Hu, Yuheng Zhang, David Simchi-Levi
arXiv:2608.24696v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) and on-policy distillation (OPD) have become two widely adopted paradigms for post-training lar...
By Wenze Lin, Jiale Zhao, Xitai Jiang, Songde Rao, Yining Li, Shenzhi Wang, Bingxiang He, Gao Huang