arXiv:2610.08448v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own generations using teacher feedback. With different tokenizers, comparing teacher and student...
By Bingxi Hou, Guochao Jiang, Guofeng Quan, Weiqing Li, Wenfeng Feng, Guohua Liu, Yuewei Zhang
arXiv:2608. 14277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) offers a promising way to transfer reasoning capabilities from stronger teacher models, but applying it to long-context reasoning teachers and short-context students introduces practical challenges, including tokenizer mismatch, teacher-student distribution mismatch, response length explosion, and training instability.
By Haonan He, Haodi Lei, Yun Luo, Haoran Zhang, Shunkai Zhang, Yizhuo Li, Shengji Tang, Zhilin Wang, Runzhe Zhan, Lei Bai, Ganqu Cui, Fangchen Yu, Yafu Li, Peng Ye, Ning Ding, Yu Cheng
arXiv:2607. 22334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-weight language models from different families exhibit complementary capabilities, motivating their consolidation into a compact student through on-policy distillation (OPD).
By Hao Wang, Kun Yuan, Wenlin Zhong, Minglei Zhang, Han Xiao, Ming Sun, Honggang Qi
The paper investigates on‑policy distillation (OPD) for large language models, showing that OPD learns not only which tokens to consider but also where to keep reasoning paths open. It introduces the entropy shape—a sequence of next‑token entropies—to capture this "where to branch" aspect and proposes the Entropy Shape Correlation (ESC) metric to measure student‑teacher agreement. By tracking ESC during training and adjusting a teacher’s entropy while preserving token preferences, the authors demonstrate that controlling where to branch causally drives OPD gains, and they establish a teacher‑selection protocol where pre‑OPD ESC predicts the best teacher more accurately than existing methods.
By Shiping Yang, Chuanqi Tang, Hossein Hajimirsadeghi, Layla El Asri, Mohammad Amin Shabani, Angel X. Chang
arXiv:2610.14022v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) improves language-model by supervising a student on prefixes sampled from its own policy, but its supervision remains co...
By Yingdong Shi, Zhihong Li, Changming Li, Jingyi Yu, Quan Li, Kan Ren
arXiv:2606. 08432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a central post-training tool for large language models (LLMs), providing dense per-token teacher supervision along the student's own rollouts.
By Li Jiang, Haoran Xu, Yichuan Ding, Amy Zhang