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On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a core technique in the post-training of large language models, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood. This paper provides a systematic investigation of OPD dynamics and mechanisms. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yaxuan Li , Yuxin Zuo , Bingxiang He , Jinqian Zhang , Chaojun Xiao , Cheng Qian , Tianyu Yu , Huan-ang Gao , Wenkai Yang , Zhiyuan Liu , Ning Ding

On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used in LLM post-training because it can leverage a teacher model to provide dense supervision on student rollouts. The standard implementation, however, usually reduces distribution matching to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yuqian Fu , Haohuan Huang , Kaiwen Jiang , Jiacai Liu , Zhuo Jiang , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao

Knowledge distillation improves large language model (LLM) reasoning by compressing the knowledge of a teacher LLM to train smaller LLMs. On-policy distillation advances this approach by having the student sample its own trajectories while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Siyan Zhao , Zhihui Xie , Mengchen Liu , Jing Huang , Guan Pang , Feiyu Chen , Aditya Grover

On-policy distillation (OPD) and on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) have emerged as promising post-training methods for large language models, offering dense token-level supervision on trajectories sampled from the model's own policy.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Siqi Zhu , Xuyan Ye , Hongyu Lu , Weiye Shi , Ge Liu

On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an efficient post-training paradigm for large language models. However, existing studies largely attribute this advantage to denser and more stable supervision, while the parameter-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Yuchen Cai , Ding Cao , Liang Lin , Chunxi Luo , Xin Xu , Kai Yang , Weijie Liu , Saiyong Yang , Tianxiang Zhao , Guangzhong Sun , Guiquan Liu , Junfeng Fang

On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for consolidating the capabilities of specialized expert models into a single student model. Despite its empirical success, the conditions under which…

On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) is a unified learning framework in which a single large language model acts simultaneously as both teacher and student. Unlike conventional knowledge distillation that relies on a separate, often larger…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Fangming Cui , Sunan Li , Jiahong Li

On-policy distillation (OPD), which samples trajectories from the student model and supervises them with a teacher at the token level, avoids relying solely on verifiable terminal rewards and can yield better generalization than off-policy…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become a central engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains the dominant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Mingyang Song , Mao Zheng

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains student models under their own induced distribution while leveraging supervision from stronger teachers. We identify a failure mode of OPD: as training progresses, on-policy rollouts can undergo abrupt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Feng Luo , Yu-Neng Chuang , Guanchu Wang , Zicheng Xu , Xiaotian Han , Tianyi Zhang , Vladimir Braverman

On-policy distillation (OPD) is a powerful paradigm for model alignment, yet its reliance on teacher logits restricts its application to white-box scenarios. We contend that structured semantic rubrics can serve as a scalable alternative to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Junfeng Fang , Zhepei Hong , Mao Zheng , Mingyang Song , Gengsheng Li , Houcheng Jiang , Dan Zhang , Haiyun Guo , Xiang Wang , Tat-Seng Chua

Knowledge distillation offers a promising path to transfer reasoning capabilities from large teacher models to efficient student models; however, existing token-level on-policy distillation methods require token-level alignment between the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Jing Xiong , Hui Shen , Shansan Gong , Yuxin Cheng , Jianghan Shen , Chaofan Tao , Haochen Tan , Haoli Bai , Lifeng Shang , Ngai Wong

On-policy distillation (OPD) leverages dense teacher rewards to enhance reasoning models. However, scaling OPD to long-horizon tasks exposes a critical flaw: as the student's generated prefix inevitably diverges from the teacher's thought…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zhicheng Yang , Zhijiang Guo , Yifan Song , Minrui Xu , Yongxin Wang , Yiwei Wang , Xiaodan Liang , Jing Tang

We study {on-policy self-distillation} (OPSD), where a language model improves its reasoning ability by distilling privileged teacher distributions along its own on-policy trajectories. Despite the performance gains of OPSD, we identify a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yuxiao Yang , Xiaoyun Wang , Weitong Zhang

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories under token-level teacher supervision, but existing methods are capped by a single-teacher capability ceiling: when the teacher errs, the student inherits the error. OPD…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jianze Wang , Ying Liu , Jinlong Chen , Xuchun Hu , Qilong Zhang , Yu Cao , Jun Wang , Hua Yang , Yong Xie , Qianglong Chen

On-policy distillation (OPD), which supervises a student on its own sampled trajectories, has emerged as a data-efficient post-training method for improving reasoning while avoiding the reward dependence of reinforcement learning and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ke Zhang , Yunjie Tian , Dongdi Zhao , Yijiang Li , Yuanye Liu , Vishal M Patel , Di Fu

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its own rollouts using dense feedback from a stronger teacher. Prior literature suggests that, provided teacher feedback is available, supervising the full sequence of response tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Kaiyuan Liu , Ziyuan Zhuang , Yang Bai , Bing Wang , Rongxiang Weng , Jieping Ye

Scaling on-policy distillation (OPD) for large language models (LLMs) confronts a fundamental tension: asynchronous execution is necessary for system efficiency, but structurally deviates from the ideal on-policy objective. To address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xianwei Chen , Shimin Zhang , Jibin Wu

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a student on its own rollouts using a privileged teacher, but its standard objective weights all generated tokens equally, implicitly treating the privileged teacher target as equally reliable at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Xiaogeng Liu , Xinyan Wang , Yingzi Ma , Yechao Zhang , Chaowei Xiao

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories with token-level teacher feedback and often outperforms off-policy distillation and standard reinforcement learning. However, we find that its standard advantage weighted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Nan Jia , Haojin Yang , Xing Ma , Jiesong Lian , Shuailiang Zhang , Weipeng Zhang , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai , Zequn Sun
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