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Calibrating Teacher--Student Discrepancy for On-Policy Distillation

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 18, 2026 · UTC

On-policy distillation (OPD) improves reasoning models by learning the token-level discrepancy between a stronger teacher and an on-policy student. However, this discrepancy does not purely reflect the capability gap between the teacher and the student: it also contains deviations arising from the teacher itself, which are consequently mixed into the observed teacher--student discrepancy and indiscriminately learned by standard OPD during training. This issue is further exacerbated by privileged OPD, where privileged information induces larger teacher-side likelihood shifts, thereby encouragin

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Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-23T13:51:27.104Z. This is not the publication date.