Beyond Teacher Likelihood: Group-Calibrated On-Policy Distillation for Long-Context Reasoning
On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own responses using dense token-level guidance from a stronger teacher. In long-context tasks, however, token-level teacher support can favor locally plausible responses that omit evidence distributed across the input or violate global task constraints. Task-specific verifiers, in contrast, evaluate task completion at the response level and may return graded rewards that reflect partial success. We diagnose this mismatch on fixed responses from two representative long-context evidence-aggregation tasks. Across longer input ranges, trajectory-level OPD scores become progressively less aligned with verifier rewards, indicating teacher-ver...
| Authors | Zhu Zhang, Jixun Wang, Xiaoang Xu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 19 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.