Constitutional On-Policy Safe Distillation
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has emerged as an efficient post-training paradigm by using a teacher conditioned on privileged information to provide dense token-level supervision. Prior work has shown that OPSD can collapse in verifiable reasoning tasks, while safety alignment differs in that it is guided by high-level constitutions rather than explicit target answers. However, pilot studies reveals that safety OPSD nonetheless suffers from severe collapse, where constitutional conditioning contracts the teacher distribution toward short and overly conservative responses and Reverse KL further amplifies this contraction into reduced expressiveness. We formalize this effect as geometr...
| Authors | Ming Wen, Yuxuan Liu, Kun Yang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 2 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 August 2026 |
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