Step-Level On-Policy Distillation: Interpolating Between On-Policy Distillation and Supervised Fine-Tuning
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arXiv:2608. 16333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) aligns a student model with a teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories.
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.
The paper introduces a method for offline on‑policy distillation that addresses the problem of imperfect teacher supervision. By training on teacher‑successful problems and measuring changes in token likelihoods on teacher‑failed trajectories, the authors derive a learnability signal that weights the distillation loss. This approach improves performance on mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks while reducing computational cost compared to online distillation.
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...
The paper introduces TISD, a trajectory-intervention self-distillation method that forces a teacher-selected branch action and then lets the student generate the suffix, distilling the full trajectory under a privileged-context-conditioned teacher. This approach addresses a data-collection bottleneck in on‑policy self‑distillation by exposing successor contexts that the student would otherwise miss. Experiments on coding and science domains show modest but consistent improvements in average performance metrics compared to baseline methods.
arXiv:2606. 00305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) improves large language model reasoning by training a student model on trajectories sampled from its own policy under teacher supervision.