TeacherGRPO: Closing the Capacity Gap in Reasoning Distillation via Teacher Alignment
Reasoning distillation from powerful teacher models to smaller students faces the Gap Curse: as teachers grow more sophisticated, their complex distributions increasingly diverge from what students can approximate, causing performance degradation. Existing mitigation strategies either filter out challenging examples through data selection or introduce weaker intermediate assistant models, inherently compromising supervision coverage or quality. We propose Teacher Alignment, which directly adapts the teacher toward the student's distribution without discarding data or degrading reasoning quality. However, naive alignment through standard knowledge distillation triggers catastrophic collaps...
| Authors | Zhenyu Lei, Zihan Chen, Yaochen Zhu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 September 2026 |
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