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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

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

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) 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 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) 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 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

On-policy distillation (OPD) has shown strong potential for transferring reasoning ability from frontier or domain-specific models to smaller students. While effective on static single-turn tasks, its behavior in multi-turn agent settings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Jiaqi Wang , Wenhao Zhang , Weijie Shi , Yaliang Li , James Cheng

On-policy distillation (OPD) is an increasingly important paradigm for post-training language models. However, we identify a pervasive Scaling Law of Miscalibration: while OPD effectively improves task accuracy, it systematically traps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Jiaxin Zhang , Xiangyu Peng , Qinglin Chen , Qinyuan Ye , Caiming Xiong , Chien-Sheng Wu

On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns the student with the teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories, has demonstrated strong empirical gains in improving student performance and often outperforms off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Wenkai Yang , Weijie Liu , Ruobing Xie , Kai Yang , Saiyong Yang , Yankai Lin

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), 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…

Although pre-trained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models exhibit impressive generalization in robotic manipulation, post-training remains crucial to ensure reliable performance during deployment. However, standard offline Supervised…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Zhide Zhong , Haodong Yan , Junfeng Li , Junjie He , Tianran Zhang , Haoang Li

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

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 reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for reasoning alignment in large language models, yet its sparse, outcome-level rewards make token-level credit assignment notoriously difficult. On-Policy Distillation (OPD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Binbin Zheng , Xing Ma , Yiheng Liang , Jingqing Ruan , Xiaoliang Fu , Kepeng Lin , Benchang Zhu , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a popular training paradigm in the LLM community. This paradigm selects a larger model as the teacher to provide dense, fine-grained signals for each sampled trajectory, in contrast to reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Chenxu Yang , Chuanyu Qin , Qingyi Si , Minghui Chen , Naibin Gu , Dingyu Yao , Zheng Lin , Weiping Wang , Jiaqi Wang , Nan Duan

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a promising paradigm for reasoning-oriented post-training of large language models (LLMs), especially when combined with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR). Existing OPD methods…

On-policy knowledge distillation has proven effective for language models, yet its application to vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored. We observe that standard on-policy distillation can improve a student's output quality…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Ruiqi Liu , Xiaolei Lv , Gengsheng Li , Ximo Zhu , Zhiheng Wang , Zhengbo Zhang , Junkai Chen , Zhiheng Li , Bo Li , Jun Gao , Shu Wu

On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) has recently emerged as an alternative to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), promising higher accuracy and shorter responses through token-level credit assignment from a self-teacher…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jaehoon Kim , Dongha Lee
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