Calibrating Teacher--Student Discrepancy for On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2609.21619v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) improves reasoning models by learning the token-level discrepancy between a stronger teacher and an on-policy student. However, this discrepancy does not purely reflect the capability gap between the teacher and the student: it also contains deviations arising from the teacher itself, which are consequently mixed into the observed teacher--student discrepancy and indiscriminately learned by standard OPD during training. This issue is further exacerbated by privileged OPD, where privileged information induces larger teacher-side likelihood shifts, thereby encouraging the student to learn more of the teacher's own deviation. We introduce extbf{Calibrated On-Policy Distillation (Cal-OPD)}, which estimates the teacher's self-deviation region through positive and negative privileged interventions and calibrates the original teacher--student discrepancy by retaining only the component that lies beyond this region. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that, while retaining only about 52--65% of the original teacher--student discrepancy as the optimization signal, Cal-OPD consistently outperforms standard OPD and its variants across model scales.

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-09-21