Outcome-Confounded Local Supervision in On-Policy Distillation
On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories while a teacher supplies dense token-level likelihoods at student-visited prefixes. These likelihoods are often read locally: agreement appears safe to imitate, whereas disagreement appears to identify an error. We show that both readings are confounded by the outcome of the completed trajectory. We introduce an outcome-resolved diagnostic that crosses pointwise teacher-student divergence with final-answer correctness, separating safe imitation, productive divergence, harmful divergence, and agreement-on-failure. In an eight-seed mathematical-reasoning study with a Qwen3-8B student and Qwen3-32B teacher, agreement-on-fa...
| Authors | Guoqing Ma |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 26 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 July 2026 |
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