arXiv:2605.13643cs.CL2026-05被引 7

发现强到弱强化学习中监督信号会局部失效,提出按段落动态停止训练。

Prefix Teach, Suffix Fade: Local Teachability Collapse in Strong-to-Weak On-Policy Distillation

论文配图:Prefix Teach, Suffix Fade: Local Teachability Collapse in Strong-to-Weak On-Policy Distillation
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 根据教师反馈与学生候选集的差距,动态判断是否继续监督
  • 在五个基准上优于全序列监督,在不同规模学生模型上均有效
  • 适合需要高效压缩能力且保持泛化性的模型蒸馏场景

在强到弱的在线蒸馏(OPD)中,学生模型使用自身生成轨迹并接收强教师的密集反馈。传统观点认为只要教师反馈可用,全程监督应持续提升性能。然而我们发现,尽管生成轨迹后段仍可能有教师优势,但其局部对比度下降,导致反馈难以有效指导学习,称为局部可教性坍塌。为此提出基于句段粒度的释放规则:计算教师对学生前K个候选的置信度差,按NLTK分句聚合,当出现类似BIC的显著下降时终止监督。在Qwen3系列模型上跨五项域内任务验证,该方法在不同学生规模下均优于全序列蒸馏。此外,相比基线方法,本方法更有效保留了模型在域外任务上的能力。结果表明,有效的强到弱蒸馏不仅需教师指导存在,还需其局部反馈具备可教性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its own rollouts using dense feedback from a stronger teacher. Prior literature suggests that, provided teacher feedback is available, supervising the full sequence of response tokens should monotonically improve performance. However, we demonstrate that this assumption sometimes fails to hold in strong-to-weak OPD settings. While later segments of a generated trajectory may still exhibit a non-zero teacher-student advantage, they frequently lack the local contrast that makes dense feedback effective for prioritizing student learning. We term this failure mode local teachability collapse. The resulting principle is straightforward: supervision should concentrate on trajectory regions where the teacher's feedback remains discriminative, rather than uniformly covering the entire response. We operationalize this principle through a trajectory-specific release rule. This rule measures the teacher's margin over the student's top-$K$ candidate set, aggregates this margin across NLTK-tokenized sentence segments, and truncates dense OPD supervision upon detecting a BIC-style downward change point. Experimental results across strong-to-weak distillation tasks using the Qwen3 model family indicate that this release rule consistently outperforms standard full-trajectory OPD across five in-domain benchmarks at various student scales. Furthermore, compared to baseline distillation methods, our approach better preserves model capabilities on out-of-domain task. These results suggest that effective strong-to-weak OPD requires evaluating not only the availability of teacher guidance but also its local utility, ensuring that the generated feedback remains teachable.

模型蒸馏强化学习教师学生自洽训练

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