arXiv:2602.12125cs.LGcs.AI2026-02被引 116

通过奖励外推让学生超越老师,实现更强的模型蒸馏效果。

Learning beyond Teacher: Generalized On-Policy Distillation with Reward Extrapolation

  • 引入可调参考模型和奖励缩放因子,扩展传统在线蒸馏方法。
  • 奖励缩放大于1时(奖励外推),学生性能持续优于教师,甚至超越其边界。
  • 适合追求高性能蒸馏的开发者,尤其在多领域知识融合场景下优势明显。

在线蒸馏(OPD)通过使学生在自生成轨迹上与教师的对数概率分布对齐,显著提升学生性能,常优于离线蒸馏与强化学习范式。本文首次从理论上证明,OPD是密集KL约束强化学习的特例,其中奖励函数与KL正则化权重始终相等,参考模型可为任意模型。为此,我们提出广义在线蒸馏(G-OPD)框架,引入灵活参考模型与奖励缩放因子,以调节奖励项与KL正则化的相对权重。在数学推理与代码生成任务上的实验揭示两个新发现:(1) 将奖励缩放因子设为大于1(即奖励外推,称ExOPD),在多种师生规模组合下均优于标准OPD;特别地,在融合不同领域专家知识回传至原学生模型时,ExOPD使学生突破教师性能边界,超越各领域教师。(2) 基于ExOPD,在强到弱蒸馏中,若将参考模型设为教师预强化学习版本,可获得更准确的奖励信号,进一步提升蒸馏性能。但此方法需访问教师的预训练版本,计算开销更高。本工作为未来OPD研究提供了新视角。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns the student with the teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories, has demonstrated strong empirical gains in improving student performance and often outperforms off-policy distillation and reinforcement learning (RL) paradigms. In this work, we first theoretically show that OPD is a special case of dense KL-constrained RL where the reward function and the KL regularization are always weighted equally and the reference model can by any model. Then, we propose the Generalized On-Policy Distillation (G-OPD) framework, which extends the standard OPD objective by introducing a flexible reference model and a reward scaling factor that controls the relative weight of the reward term against the KL regularization. Through comprehensive experiments on math reasoning and code generation tasks, we derive two novel insights: (1) Setting the reward scaling factor to be greater than 1 (i.e., reward extrapolation), which we term ExOPD, consistently improves over standard OPD across a range of teacher-student size pairings. In particular, in the setting where we merge the knowledge from different domain experts, obtained by applying domain-specific RL to the same student model, back into the original student, ExOPD enables the student to even surpass the teacher's performance boundary and outperform the domain teachers. (2) Building on ExOPD, we further find that in the strong-to-weak distillation setting (i.e., distilling a smaller student from a larger teacher), performing reward correction by choosing the reference model as the teacher's base model before RL yields a more accurate reward signal and further improves distillation performance. However, this choice assumes access to the teacher's pre-RL variant and incurs more computational overhead. We hope our work offers new insights for future research on OPD.

模型蒸馏强化学习奖励外推知识融合

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