Learning to Foresee: Unveiling the Unlocking Efficiency of On-Policy Distillation
On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an efficient post-training paradigm for large language models. However, existing studies largely attribute this advantage to denser and more stable supervision, while the parameter-level mechanisms underlying OPD's efficiency remain poorly understood. In this work, we argue that OPD's efficiency stems from a form of ``foresight'': it establishes a stable update trajectory toward the final model early in training. This foresight manifests in two aspects. First, at the \textbf{Module-Allocation Level}, OPD identifies regions with low marginal utility and concentrates updates on modules that are more critical to reasoning. Second, at the \textbf{Up...
| Authors | Yuchen Cai, Ding Cao, Liang Lin et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 12 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 May 2026 |
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