{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Daily Paper Cast","title":"Eliciting Weak-to-Strong Generalization with On-Policy Reverse Distillation","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1281,"description":"\n 🤗 Upvotes: 57 | cs.LG, cs.CL\nAuthors:\nYoungrok Park, Sangmin Bae, Hojung Jung, Jongwoo Ko, Yunseon Choi, Young Jin Kim, Pashmina Cameron, Aaron Courville, Se-Young Yun\nTitle:\nEliciting Weak-to-Strong Generalization with On-Policy Reverse Distillation\nArxiv:\nhttp://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08798v1\nAbstract:\nWeak-to-strong generalization asks whether stronger models can learn from weaker supervisors and surpass them. This question is particularly important for successive model generations and multi-domain consolidation, where repeating frontier-scale post-training from scratch can be prohibitively expensive. Yet conventional distillation treats the weak teacher as an optimization target, potentially imposing its capacity ceiling on the student. We introduce On-Policy Reverse Distillation (OPRD), which evaluates the teacher's policy shift relative to its reference policy on student rollouts and amplifies the component of the student's verifier-driven policy gradient along that direction. By rescaling only verifier-supported updates, OPRD preserves the stationary points of policy optimization while accelerating learning beyond the teacher. In both successive model transfer and multi-teacher distillation, OPRD achieves higher performance with fewer student updates than existing RL and distillation approaches. Response-style analysis shows that OPRD students remain closer to models trained with verifier-based RL alone than to their weak teachers, suggesting that teacher guidance accelerates rather than redirects the student's own optimization. Results in conventional strong-to-weak distillation further demonstrate that OPRD effectively combines verifier-driven policy optimization with teacher guidance regardless of capacity ordering.","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}