{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Daily Paper Cast","title":"Trust Region On-Policy Distillation","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1445,"description":"\n 🤗 Upvotes: 33 | cs.LG, cs.CL\n\n Authors:\n Xingrun Xing, Haoqing Wang, Boyan Gao, Ziheng Li, Yehui Tang\n\n Title:\n Trust Region On-Policy Distillation\n\n Arxiv:\n http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01249v2\n\n Abstract:\n On-Policy Distillation (OPD) is a fundamental technique for efficient post-training of large language models (LLMs), with broad applications in agent learning, multi-task enhancement, and model compression. However, OPD training becomes unstable when the teacher and student distributions differ substantially, as teacher supervision on student-generated tokens may yield unreliable policy gradients and even cause optimization failure. This work addresses reliable on-policy token-level supervision through credit assignment strategies, and proposes Trust Region On-Policy Distillation, TrOPD. It features the following characteristics: 1) Trust-Region On-Policy Learning: TrOPD performs OPD only in regions where the teacher provides reliable supervision, mitigating the optimization difficulty of the K1 reverse-KL estimator under distribution mismatch. 2) Outlier Estimation: For outlier regions, we explore gradient clipping, masking, and forward-KL estimation to reduce the adverse effects of unreliable supervision. 3) Off-Policy Guidance: The student continues generation from teacher prefixes and uses forward KL to imitate off-policy guidance, encouraging on-policy exploration toward reliable regions. Experiments show that TrOPD consistently outperforms SoTA OPD baselines, including OPD, EOPD, and REOPOLD, across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general-domain benchmarks.\n ","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/8lOVNnuwhrA3rxrDMv7Osu4j_t1-jORooO6NfGcQhcw/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS81Zjg1/YzRhODczMDU4MmE4/OGMwN2FiNDlmYzI2/MDliMi5qcGVn.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}