Beyond the Teacher: Understanding and Preserving Distillation Overshoot in Agentic On-Policy Distillation
On-policy distillation (OPD) trains agents on their own trajectories using supervision from a stronger teacher. We uncover a counterintuitive phenomenon in multi-turn agentic tasks: a smaller, initially weaker student can substantially outperform its teacher during training, only to regress as distillation continues. We term this phenomenon distillation overshoot. Through decision- and task-level analyses, we trace overshoot to two competing effects of OPD: repairing weak student decisions and eroding successful student choices that the teacher disfavors. Early in training, repair outpaces erosion, allowing the student to combine the teacher's corrections with its own strengths and surpas...
| Authors | Jike Zhong, Ming Li, Yuxiang Lai et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 18 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 October 2026 |
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