改进大模型训练中的教师引导机制,提升稳定性与效果
Revisiting On-Policy Distillation: Empirical Failure Modes and Simple Fixes

- 采用局部支持匹配和截断KL散度,优化教师引导
- 在多任务推理中性能比基线提升19.8%
- 适合需要稳定强化学习训练的LLM后训练场景
在大模型后训练中,基于策略的蒸馏(OPD)日益流行,因其可利用教师模型对学生模型生成序列提供密集监督。然而标准实现将分布匹配简化为采样词元的对数似然比,导致长序列生成时前缀偏离教师典型支持区域,学习信号变得脆弱。本文从理论和实现双重视角重新审视该方法:理论上,词元级OPD虽有偏差但方差界更紧;合成实验表明更强的未来奖励耦合会增加梯度方差并导致训练不稳定。实证发现三种失效模式:词元级监督失衡、教师对自生成前缀指导不可靠、分词器或特殊标记不匹配。为此提出教师顶K局部支持匹配,结合截断反KL目标、top-p回溯采样及特殊标记掩码。在单任务推理与多任务基准测试中,该方法显著提升优化稳定性,相比标准采样词元OPD基线性能提升19.8%,提供了一套实用的稳定策略蒸馏方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used in LLM post-training because it can leverage a teacher model to provide dense supervision on student rollouts. The standard implementation, however, usually reduces distribution matching to a sampled-token log-ratio, which can make the learning signal fragile on long rollouts whose prefixes drift away from the teacher's typical support. We revisit this formulation from both theoretical and implementation perspectives. Theoretically, token-level OPD is biased relative to sequence-level reverse-KL minimization, but admits a substantially tighter worst-case variance bound; a controlled synthetic study further shows that stronger future-reward coupling increases gradient variance and destabilizes training. Empirically, we identify three failure modes of sampled-token OPD: imbalanced token-level supervision, unreliable teacher guidance on student-generated prefixes, and tokenizer or special-token mismatch. These findings motivate teacher top-K local support matching, a truncated reverse-KL objective that compares teacher and student distributions over a teacher-supported token set at each prefix, together with top-p rollout sampling and special-token masking. Across single-task reasoning and multi-task benchmarks spanning agentic and reasoning settings, this objective improves optimization stability and yields a +19.8% performance gain over standard sampled-token OPD baselines, providing a practical recipe for more stable on-policy distillation.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。