arXiv Computation and Language By Jongwoo Ko, Sara Abdali, Young Jin Kim, Tianyi Chen, Pashmina Cameron

Scaling Reasoning Efficiently via Relaxed On-Policy Distillation

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The paper introduces REOPOLD, a framework that improves on-policy distillation (OPD) for reasoning tasks by addressing the problem of uniform credit allocation. REOPOLD selectively controls where teacher feedback is applied, its strength, and the timing of changes during training, thereby reducing entropy collapse and negative transfer. Experiments show that REOPOLD achieves up to 12× higher sample efficiency compared to recent post‑training baselines and can be extended to cross‑vocabulary distillation, self‑distillation, and test‑time scaling.

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