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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

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) trains a student on its own rollouts with token-level teacher supervision. Recent selective OPD methods exploit the non-uniformity of OPD signals by prioritizing high-entropy or high-disagreement tokens. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yuanyi Wang , Su Lu , Yanggan Gu , Pengkai Wang , Yifan Yang , Zhaoyi Yan , Congkai Xie , Jianmin Wu , Hongxia Yang

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

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is an emerging LLM post-training paradigm in which the model serves as its own teacher: conditioned on privileged information such as a reference trace or hint, the same policy provides dense token-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Hongbin Zhang , Chaozheng Wang , Kehai Chen , Youcheng Pan , Yang Xiang , Jinpeng Wang , Min Zhang

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

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

Large language models are often post-trained with sparse verifier rewards, which indicate whether a sampled trajectory succeeds but provide limited guidance about where reasoning succeeds or fails. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers denser…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Weichen Yu , Xiaomin Li , Yizhou Zhao , Xiaoze Liu , Ruowang Zhang , Haixin Wang , Yinyi Luo , Chen Henry Wu , Gaurav Mittal , Matt Fredrikson , Yu Hu

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to long-context tasks requires post-training methods that remain accurate and coherent over thousands of tokens. Existing approaches are limited in several ways: 1) off-policy methods such as supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Miguel Moura Ramos , Duarte M. Alves , André F. T. Martins

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) suffers from sparse outcome signals, creating severe exploration bottlenecks on complex reasoning tasks. Recent on-policy self-distillation methods attempt to address this by utilizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yang Li , Erik Nijkamp , Semih Yavuz , Shafiq Joty

Training vision-language models (VLMs) for complex reasoning remains a challenging task, i.a. due to the scarcity of high-quality image-text reasoning data. Conversely, text-based reasoning resources are abundant and scalable, but it is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Walid Bousselham , Hilde Kuehne , Cordelia Schmid

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a principled post-training paradigm for Temporal Video Grounding (TVG) due to its on-policy optimization, yet existing GRPO-based methods remain fundamentally constrained by sparse reward signals and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Jiaze Li , Hao Yin , Haoran Xu , Boshen Xu , Wenhui Tan , Zewen He , Jianzhong Ju , Zhenbo Luo , Jian Luan

While recent work in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has shown that a small subset of critical tokens disproportionately drives reasoning gains, an analogous token-level understanding of On-Policy Distillation (OPD)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yuxuan Jiang , Runchao Li , Shubhashis Roy Dipta , Dawei Li , Zhao Yang

Existing Flow Matching (FM) text-to-image models suffer from two critical bottlenecks under multi-task alignment: the reward sparsity induced by scalar-valued rewards, and the gradient interference arising from jointly optimizing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zhen Fang , Wenxuan Huang , Yu Zeng , Yiming Zhao , Shuang Chen , Kaituo Feng , Yunlong Lin , Lin Chen , Zehui Chen , Shaosheng Cao , Feng Zhao

On-policy distillation (OPD) is an effective post-training paradigm for large language models but requires a live teacher server throughout training, resulting in substantial infrastructure overhead. We investigate whether OPD can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yecheng Wu , Song Han , Hai Cai

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 is pivotal for transferring reasoning capabilities to capacity-constrained models, yet remains prone to instability and negative transfer. We show that on-policy distillation can be interpreted, both theoretically and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Jongwoo Ko , Sara Abdali , Young Jin Kim , Tianyi Chen , Pashmina Cameron

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by providing dense token-level supervision for on-policy rollouts. However, existing OPSD methods often yield limited gains on in-domain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Ziqi Zhao , Xinyu Ma , Liu Yang , Yujie Feng , Daiting Shi , Jingzhou He , Xin Xin , Zhaochun Ren , Xiao-Ming Wu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used to train LLM agents for multi-turn interactive tasks, but its sample efficiency is severely limited by sparse rewards and long horizons. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) alleviates this by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Hao Wang , Guozhi Wang , Han Xiao , Yufeng Zhou , Yue Pan , Jichao Wang , Ke Xu , Yafei Wen , Xiaohu Ruan , Xiaoxin Chen , Honggang Qi

On-Policy Distillation (OPD) has gained wide attraction as an LLM post-training paradigm due to its effectiveness in improving capabilities without introducing model distribution drift, and consequently, regression in general tasks.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Aristotelis Lazaridis , Dylan Bates , Aman Sharma , Brian King , Vincent Lu , Jack FitzGerald