Teaching a Moving Student: Rethinking the Curriculum of On-Policy Distillation
In on-policy distillation (OPD), the student determines which states receive teacher supervision. As its policy evolves, earlier response prefixes become less likely even though teacher-student disagreement on them persists. Under matched trajectory and optimization budgets, neither more queries nor more frequent rollout resampling is uniformly beneficial. Current-policy rollouts outperform initial-policy rollouts at shorter response budgets, but this ranking reverses at longer budgets. Replaying initial-policy rollouts after current-policy training improves accuracy, whereas replaying fixed recent rollouts does not reproduce the gain. We propose R-OPD, a gradient-triggered curriculum tha...
| Authors | Lingxiang Hu, Tianle Xia, Yiding Sun et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 6 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 September 2026 |
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