OPRD performs distillation in hidden-state space on on-policy data for deterministic gradients and better math benchmark performance, plus OPRD-Bridge for cross-architecture transfer via low-rank projectors.
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Unifying group-relative and self-distillation policy optimization via sample routing
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DistIL applies distributional DAgger with forward cross-entropy to achieve monotonic policy improvement and better Pass@N from rich feedback in RL for reasoning tasks.
EST-PRM stress-tests five PRM models on 4,687 reasoning chains from MATH-500, GSM8K, and PRMBench using three label-preserving transformations and reports model-specific vulnerability patterns.
RLRT augments GRPO by reinforcing tokens on correct student rollouts that the teacher would not have predicted, outperforming standard self-distillation and exploration baselines on Qwen3 models.
TRACE improves math reasoning by distilling only on annotator-marked critical spans with forward KL on correct key spans, optional reverse KL on errors, and GRPO elsewhere, gaining 2.76 points over GRPO while preserving OOD performance.
PBSD derives a reward-reweighted teacher distribution as the analytic optimum of a reward-regularized objective, yielding better stability and performance than KL-based self-distillation on math reasoning and tool-use tasks.
Disagreement-modulated reverse-KL barycenter targets let on-policy self-distillation attenuate privileged leakage while preserving exploration, beating SDPO and GRPO on SciKnowEval and GPQA.
Transferring a weak model’s RL-induced log-ratio policy shift on a strong student’s own rollouts raises AIME accuracy more cheaply than imitating the weak teacher or running matched-step RL on the student.
RAPS-DA improves RAG robustness to heterogeneous knowledge conflicts by training regime-specific peer specialists with hard routing and a dual-layer token selector for focused supervision.
RLCSD contrasts teacher-student distributional gaps under correct versus wrong hints to suppress privilege-induced style drift and concentrate supervision on task tokens, outperforming GRPO and prior OPSD on Qwen3 and Olmo models.
PTD-PO supplies step-wise token-distribution supervision to student policies via in-context privileged hints derived from spatial attention and intermediate reasoning, while keeping the student in an answer-free context and using Top-K Jensen-Shannon divergence for stable alignment.
SocraticPO adds Socratic-style teacher guidance and reward decay to RL rollouts for LLMs, improving performance on scientific reasoning benchmarks over baselines.
DASD improves math reasoning in LLMs by adaptively directing self-distillation based on per-token entropy to balance exploration and step accuracy, outperforming prior self-distillation and RLVR baselines on six benchmarks.
RESD turns failure trajectories into token-level supervision via retrospective reflections and a persistent global playbook, enabling faster improvement than standard self-distillation or GRPO with only one rollout per prompt.
Anti-Self-Distillation reverses self-distillation signals via PMI to fix overconfidence on structural tokens, matching GRPO baseline accuracy 2-10x faster with up to 11.5 point gains across 4B-30B models.
SimCT enlarges the supervision space in cross-tokenizer on-policy distillation using short jointly tokenizable multi-token continuations, producing consistent gains over shared-token baselines on math and code benchmarks.
On-policy distillation works when student and teacher models share thinking patterns and the teacher adds new capabilities, with success tied to alignment on a small set of high-probability tokens.
TREK uses verified teacher proposals to expand a student model's exploration support before standard GRPO refinement, improving performance on hard math and agentic tasks.
A step-wise reweighting of on-policy distillation, based on per-step student-teacher divergence, improves tool-integrated reasoning in 0.6B and 1.7B language models.
VISD proposes structured self-distillation with a multi-dimensional judge model and direction-magnitude decoupling to improve token-level credit assignment and convergence speed in VideoLLM reasoning training.
A survey creates a taxonomy for on-policy distillation in LLMs that separates temporal credit assignment from vocabulary-level probability routing.
PGPO modulates per-step trust in self-distilled updates via a mutual-information estimate derived from a viscous-fluid analogy, preserves SGD weak-approximation order, and reports gains of up to 4.5 points on Science-QA while avoiding late-training collapse.
This overview paper explains the conceptual foundations and design principles of On-Policy Self-Distillation for large language models from a beginner's perspective.
citing papers explorer
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OPRD: On-Policy Representation Distillation
OPRD performs distillation in hidden-state space on on-policy data for deterministic gradients and better math benchmark performance, plus OPRD-Bridge for cross-architecture transfer via low-rank projectors.
-
Reinforcement Learning from Rich Feedback with Distributional DAgger
DistIL applies distributional DAgger with forward cross-entropy to achieve monotonic policy improvement and better Pass@N from rich feedback in RL for reasoning tasks.
-
EST-PRM: Stress-Testing Process Reward Models Before They Become Load-Bearing
EST-PRM stress-tests five PRM models on 4,687 reasoning chains from MATH-500, GSM8K, and PRMBench using three label-preserving transformations and reports model-specific vulnerability patterns.
-
Rebellious Student: Reversing Teacher Signals for Reasoning Exploration with Self-Distilled RLVR
RLRT augments GRPO by reinforcing tokens on correct student rollouts that the teacher would not have predicted, outperforming standard self-distillation and exploration baselines on Qwen3 models.
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TRACE: Distilling Where It Matters via Token-Routed Self On-Policy Alignment
TRACE improves math reasoning by distilling only on annotator-marked critical spans with forward KL on correct key spans, optional reverse KL on errors, and GRPO elsewhere, gaining 2.76 points over GRPO while preserving OOD performance.
-
Preference-Based Self-Distillation: Beyond KL Matching via Reward Regularization
PBSD derives a reward-reweighted teacher distribution as the analytic optimum of a reward-regularized objective, yielding better stability and performance than KL-based self-distillation on math reasoning and tool-use tasks.
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DemoPSD: Disagreement-Modulated Policy Self-Distillation
Disagreement-modulated reverse-KL barycenter targets let on-policy self-distillation attenuate privileged leakage while preserving exploration, beating SDPO and GRPO on SciKnowEval and GPQA.
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Weak-to-Strong Generalization via Direct On-Policy Distillation
Transferring a weak model’s RL-induced log-ratio policy shift on a strong student’s own rollouts raises AIME accuracy more cheaply than imitating the weak teacher or running matched-step RL on the student.
-
Regime-Aware Peer Specialization for Robust RAG under Heterogeneous Knowledge Conflicts
RAPS-DA improves RAG robustness to heterogeneous knowledge conflicts by training regime-specific peer specialists with hard routing and a dual-layer token selector for focused supervision.
-
RLCSD: Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive On-Policy Self-Distillation
RLCSD contrasts teacher-student distributional gaps under correct versus wrong hints to suppress privilege-induced style drift and concentrate supervision on task tokens, outperforming GRPO and prior OPSD on Qwen3 and Olmo models.
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Teaching the Way, Not the Answer: Privileged Tutoring Distillation for Multimodal Policy Optimization
PTD-PO supplies step-wise token-distribution supervision to student policies via in-context privileged hints derived from spatial attention and intermediate reasoning, while keeping the student in an answer-free context and using Top-K Jensen-Shannon divergence for stable alignment.
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SocraticPO: Policy Optimization via Interactive Guidance
SocraticPO adds Socratic-style teacher guidance and reward decay to RL rollouts for LLMs, improving performance on scientific reasoning benchmarks over baselines.
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Tailoring Teaching to Aptitude: Direction-Adaptive Self-Distillation for LLM Reasoning
DASD improves math reasoning in LLMs by adaptively directing self-distillation based on per-token entropy to balance exploration and step accuracy, outperforming prior self-distillation and RLVR baselines on six benchmarks.
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Learning with Rare Success but Rich Feedback via Reflection-Enhanced Self-Distillation
RESD turns failure trajectories into token-level supervision via retrospective reflections and a persistent global playbook, enabling faster improvement than standard self-distillation or GRPO with only one rollout per prompt.
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Anti-Self-Distillation for Reasoning RL via Pointwise Mutual Information
Anti-Self-Distillation reverses self-distillation signals via PMI to fix overconfidence on structural tokens, matching GRPO baseline accuracy 2-10x faster with up to 11.5 point gains across 4B-30B models.
-
SimCT: Recovering Lost Supervision for Cross-Tokenizer On-Policy Distillation
SimCT enlarges the supervision space in cross-tokenizer on-policy distillation using short jointly tokenizable multi-token continuations, producing consistent gains over shared-token baselines on math and code benchmarks.
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Rethinking On-Policy Distillation of Large Language Models: Phenomenology, Mechanism, and Recipe
On-policy distillation works when student and teacher models share thinking patterns and the teacher adds new capabilities, with success tied to alignment on a small set of high-probability tokens.
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TREK: Distill to Explore, Reinforce to Refine
TREK uses verified teacher proposals to expand a student model's exploration support before standard GRPO refinement, improving performance on hard math and agentic tasks.
-
SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents
A step-wise reweighting of on-policy distillation, based on per-step student-teacher divergence, improves tool-integrated reasoning in 0.6B and 1.7B language models.
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VISD: Enhancing Video Reasoning via Structured Self-Distillation
VISD proposes structured self-distillation with a multi-dimensional judge model and direction-magnitude decoupling to improve token-level credit assignment and convergence speed in VideoLLM reasoning training.
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A Formula-Driven Survey and Research Agenda for On-Policy Distillation
A survey creates a taxonomy for on-policy distillation in LLMs that separates temporal credit assignment from vocabulary-level probability routing.
-
Physics-Guided Policy Optimization with Self-Distillation
PGPO modulates per-step trust in self-distilled updates via a mutual-information estimate derived from a viscous-fluid analogy, preserves SGD weak-approximation order, and reports gains of up to 4.5 points on Science-QA while avoiding late-training collapse.
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A Brief Overview: On-Policy Self-Distillation In Large Language Models
This overview paper explains the conceptual foundations and design principles of On-Policy Self-Distillation for large language models from a beginner's perspective.
- When Context Returns: Toward Robust Internalization in On-Policy Distillation