Bridging Reasoning Trajectories in On-Policy Distillation via Near-Future Guidance
On-Policy Distillation (OPD) improves large language model reasoning by training a student model on trajectories sampled from its own policy under teacher supervision. Although OPD operates on trajectories, its learning signal remains token-level: it identifies deviations through high-loss tokens and repairs them through local reverse-KL correction. We show that this "trajectory-sampled but token-learned" mechanism cannot reliably bridge student trajectories toward teacher trajectories. About 30% of high-loss tokens fall into the low-divergence regime, indicating that many are surface-form mismatches rather than real reasoning forks. Moreover, even truly divergent tokens are difficult to ...
| Authors | Yuxuan Jiang, Francis Ferraro |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 June 2026 |
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