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Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a central paradigm for post-training LLM agents, yet its trajectory-level reward signal provides only coarse supervision for long-horizon interaction. On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) complements…

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…

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…

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…

Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) is difficult to scale to small language models due to instability in long-horizon tool interactions and limited model capacity. While reinforcement learning methods like group relative policy optimization…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in mathematical reasoning, but this ability is not equally accessible across languages. Especially low-resource languages exhibit much lower reasoning performance. To address…

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…

Moving beyond simple scalar rewards toward richer world feedback is a natural path to more scalable RL post-training. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising recent approach that uses arbitrary feedback as learning signal, yet its…

Knowledge Distillation (KD) can transfer the reasoning abilities of large models to smaller ones, which can reduce the costs to generate Chain-of-Thoughts for reasoning tasks. KD methods typically ask the student to mimic the teacher's…

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…

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,…

On-policy self-distillation (self-OPD) densifies reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by letting a policy teach itself under privileged context. We find that when this guidance spans the full response, all-token KL spends…

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…

Self-distillation has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for LLMs, often improving performance while shortening reasoning traces. However, in mathematical reasoning, we find that it can reduce response length while degrading…

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…