Interpolated Policy Distillation: A Controllable Continuum Between Off-Policy and On-Policy Distillation
Off-policy and on-policy distillation have traditionally been formulated as separate paradigms, each favoring a different property of distillation trajectories. Teacher-generated (off-policy) traces are typically high-quality but lie far from the student's distribution, whereas student-generated (on-policy) rollouts are more learnable but often contain erroneous reasoning. We view these paradigms as the endpoints of a policy continuum and posit that a more effective rollout policy may lie in between. We introduce \textbf{Interpolated Policy Distillation (IPD)}, which defines the next-token distribution at every decoding step as an explicit linear interpolation between the student and teac...
| Authors | Youxu Shi, Yifan Sun, Dacheng Yin et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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