On-Policy Distillation Teaches New Skills but Not New Knowledge
On-policy distillation (OPD) strengthens language-model reasoning, yet whether students acquire new factual knowledge or compositional skill for multi-step reasoning remains unknown. We separate these capabilities using a controlled synthetic framework that measures the student's initial capabilities and independently controls the teacher's additional facts, compositional skill, or both. Across four models from three families, reverse-KL OPD reliably transfers compositional skill across unseen reasoning structures, but transfers minimal factual knowledge. Decoupling the distillation recipe reveals the source of this asymmetry: replacing reverse KL with forward KL restores factual transfer...
| Authors | Yixuan Tang, Yi Yang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 7 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 October 2026 |
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