arXiv:2609.37500v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains language models using dense token-level teacher supervision on student-generated trajectories. However, its relianc...
By Yuxiao Yang, Shangzhe Li, Tianrun Yu, Kaixiang Zhao, Taylor W. Killian, Weitong Zhang
arXiv:2610.02703v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) improves large language model reasoning by training students on their own rollouts with dense token-wise supervision from...
By Yuxiang Zhang, Ding Cao, Shuting Cui, Lei Wang, Weijieying Ren, Tianxiang Zhao
arXiv:2609.33455v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its own trajectories using dense token-level feedback from a stronger teacher model. Since e...
By Zizhuo Lin, Quanling Liu, Yi Yang, Yawei Luo
The paper reports that in on‑policy distillation for large language models, reasoning performance can be improved by supervising only a tiny fraction of generated tokens—sometimes just one or two tokens per reasoning trajectory, about 0.05% of all tokens. This sparse supervision consistently matches or exceeds full‑token training across nine teacher‑student setups on mathematical reasoning, and is also validated on coding reasoning, Llama models, and PPO‑based reinforcement learning with verifiable reward. The findings suggest that effective post‑training does not require token‑intensive supervision and may align more closely with natural learning processes that focus on critical reasoning steps.
By Zhishuai Liu, Xingzi Xu, Mehmet Saygin Seyfioglu, Pan Xu, Karim Bouyarmane
The paper introduces DIAL-OPD, a token‑selection strategy for on‑policy distillation that weights reward magnitude by the logarithmic mean of teacher and student probabilities, controlled by a parameter β. Experiments on four teacher‑student pairs across seven mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that retaining only 40 % of tokens with DIAL‑OPD yields up to 5.25 % higher mean accuracy than vanilla OPD and doubles AIME25 Pass@16, outperforming even stronger full‑token baselines. The study demonstrates that careful supervision allocation can surpass gains from simply scaling teacher size.
By Anhao Zhao, Haoran Xin, Junlong Tong, Yingqi Fan, Xuan Lu, Ping Nie, Wenjie Li, Xiaoyu Shen
arXiv:2606. 09091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an important post-training paradigm.
By Dongze Hao, Zhiwei Jin, Chen Chen, Haonan Lu