From Dissonance to Orchestration: Teacher Intervention in On-Policy Distillation
On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own reasoning trajectories using feedback from a stronger teacher. Teacher interventions can improve these trajectories, but also change the distribution on which the student learns. Our controlled studies show that rollout quality alone is an incomplete criterion for allocating teacher guidance. Deeper intervention yields diminishing gains in rollout accuracy while increasing off-policy load. In a training probe with a restricted rollout horizon, peak student accuracy and performance retention favor different intervention strengths. The preferred intervention depth and placement also vary across benchmarks. These findings motivate MAES...
| Authors | Yuhao Wang, Ruiyang Ren, Yinan Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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