Related papers: TRACE: Distilling Where It Matters via Token-Route…
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)…
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…
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…
On-policy self-distillation trains a reasoning model on its own rollouts while a teacher, often the same model conditioned on privileged context, provides dense token-level supervision. Existing objectives typically weight the teacher's…
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.…
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…
On-policy self-distillation has emerged as a promising paradigm for post-training language models, in which the model conditions on environment feedback to serve as its own teacher, providing dense token-level rewards without external…
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…
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…
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…
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…
On-policy self-distillation, where a student is pulled toward a copy of itself conditioned on privileged context (e.g., a verified solution or feedback), offers a promising direction for advancing reasoning capability without a stronger…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Distilling reasoning traces from strong large language models into smaller ones is a promising route to improve intelligence in resource-constrained settings. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: offline distillation from…
Knowledge distillation is central to LLM post-training, yet its design space remains poorly understood, especially alongside reinforcement learning (RL). We show that the prevailing paradigms, off-policy distillation and on-policy…
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…
On-policy distillation is a promising approach for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student learns from dense token-level signals along its own trajectories. This framework typically uses reverse KL divergence,…