Calibrating Teacher--Student Discrepancy for On-Policy Distillation

📅 2026-09-18
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究解决了在策略蒸馏中教师-学生差异不纯的问题,通过Cal-OPD方法估计并校正教师自身的偏差,提高模型性能。
📝 Abstract
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 encouraging the student to learn more of the teacher's own deviation. We introduce \textbf{Calibrated On-Policy Distillation (Cal-OPD)}, which estimates the teacher's self-deviation region through positive and negative privileged interventions and calibrates the original teacher--student discrepancy by retaining only the component that lies beyond this region. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that, while retaining only about 52--65\% of the original teacher--student discrepancy as the optimization signal, Cal-OPD consistently outperforms standard OPD and its variants across model scales.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

on-policy distillation
teacher-student discrepancy
privileged information
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

On-Policy Distillation
Privileged Information
Teacher-Student Discrepancy
Calibration
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Q
Qiangqiang He
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
J
Jin Li
College of Software Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China
M
MingCai Chen
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China