Is Better Teacher Supervision Enough? Unlocking Student-side Learning in Multimodal On-Policy Distillation
On-policy distillation (OPD) improves reasoning by providing token-level supervision from a teacher on a student's own trajectories. Existing methods primarily focus on enhancing this teacher-side guidance (e.g., by enriching teacher inputs and refining teacher feedback), yet we find that limited student perception is another critical bottleneck in multimodal OPD. By providing oracle visual facts, the performance of OPD-trained students can still be substantially improved for both weak and strong teachers. To address this bottleneck, we propose S-OPD, a simple multimodal on-policy distillation framework that explicitly strengthens student perceptual learning through two objectives. Specif...
| Authors | Siyuan Liu, Kanghui Tian, Yue Duan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 30 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 September 2026 |
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