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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

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 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

Extending the effective context length of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for real-world applications. While recent post-training methods have made progress in long-context scaling, they either rely on high-quality…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xinsen Zhang , Zhenkai Ding , Tianjun Pan , Run Yang , Chun Kang , Xue Xiong , Jingnan Gu

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with fine-grained visual understanding, where answers often depend on small but decisive evidence in the full image. We observe a regional-to-global perception gap: the same MLLM…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Qianhao Yuan , Jie Lou , Xing Yu , Hongyu Lin , Le Sun , Xianpei Han , Yaojie Lu

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

The landscape of high-performance image generation models is currently shifting from the inefficient multi-step ones to the efficient few-step counterparts (e.g, Z-Image-Turbo and FLUX.2-klein). However, these models present significant…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Dengyang Jiang , Xin Jin , Dongyang Liu , Zanyi Wang , Mingzhe Zheng , Ruoyi Du , Xiangpeng Yang , Qilong Wu , Zhen Li , Peng Gao , Harry Yang , Steven Hoi

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving diffusion-based text-to-image models, but existing methods are largely limited to single-task optimization. Extending RL to multiple tasks is challenging: joint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Quanhao Li , Junqiu Yu , Kaixun Jiang , Yujie Wei , Zhen Xing , Pandeng Li , Ruihang Chu , Shiwei Zhang , Yu Liu , Zuxuan Wu

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) 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…

Inference-time harnesses substantially improve large language models on complex reasoning tasks. However, the intrinsic capabilities of the underlying model remain unchanged by the addition of these external workflows. To bridge this gap,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zhengyang Zhao , Lu Ma , Wentao Zhang

Reasoning-centric large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance by generating intermediate reasoning trajectories, but often incur excessive token usage and high inference-time decoding cost. We observe that, when solving the same…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Han Yang , Mingyan Wu , Bailan He , Zeyu Cao , Sikuan Yan , Kevin Qinghong Lin , Zifeng Ding

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

Training-time privileged information (PI) can enable language models to succeed on tasks they would otherwise fail, making it a powerful tool for reinforcement learning in hard, long-horizon settings. However, transferring capabilities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Emiliano Penaloza , Dheeraj Vattikonda , Nicolas Gontier , Alexandre Lacoste , Laurent Charlin , Massimo Caccia

Policy distillation, which transfers a teacher policy to a student policy has achieved great success in challenging tasks of deep reinforcement learning. This teacher-student framework requires a well-trained teacher model which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Kwei-Herng Lai , Daochen Zha , Yuening Li , Xia Hu

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 is an efficient alternative to reinforcement learning, offering dense token-level training signals. However, its reliance on a stronger external teacher has driven recent work on on-policy self-distillation, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xin Yu , Liuchen Liao , Yiwen Zhang , Yingchen Yu , Lingzhou Xue , Qinzhen Guo

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

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

Policy Distillation (PD) has become an effective method to improve deep reinforcement learning tasks. The core idea of PD is to distill policy knowledge from a teacher agent to a student agent. However, the teacher-student framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Xinqiang Yu , Chuanguang Yang , Chengqing Yu , Libo Huang , Zhulin An , Yongjun Xu