arXiv AI By Junnan Liu, Linhao Luo, Zhijun Chen, Qianren Mao, Thuy-Trang Vu, Gholamreza Haffari

Stochastic Teacher Intervention for Agentic On-Policy Distillation

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The paper introduces STI-OPD, a stochastic teacher intervention framework that improves on-policy distillation for multi-turn agentic tasks. By measuring teacher‑student policy discrepancy with KL divergence, STI-OPD probabilistically replaces student actions with teacher actions to provide reliable supervision. An Importance‑Weighted Reverse KL objective then corrects token sampling mismatches, enabling the student to learn from mixed‑policy trajectories and outperform prior OPD baselines across benchmarks.

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