arXiv AI By Yuqi Xiong, Chunyi Peng, Zhipeng Xu, Qing Yang, Zhenghao Liu, Zulong Chen, Yu Gu, Ge Yu

Skill-Decoupled On-Policy Expert Distillation for Unified Vision-Language Models

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The paper introduces Skill-Decoupled On-Policy Expert Distillation (SCOPED), a method that trains separate experts for each capability and extracts explicit skills via reward-guided reflection. During on‑policy distillation, these skills supervise the experts but are not exposed to the unified student, encouraging the student to learn procedural knowledge internally. Experiments on eight multimodal benchmarks show SCOPED consistently outperforms both the base model and mixed‑capability reinforcement learning, highlighting the benefits of skill decoupling for integrating independently acquired capabilities.

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