混合在线蒸馏方法,让小模型高效学会复杂多轮任务。
ATOD: Annealed Turn-Aware On-Policy Distillation for Multi-Turn Agentic Tasks

- 用渐进式策略融合蒸馏与强化学习,早阶段快模仿,后期自主探索。
- 在三个数据集上平均成功率比纯蒸馏高4.16点,比强化学习高23.62点。
- 适合训练小型智能体完成复杂交互任务,尤其看重早期学习效率的场景。
训练小型语言模型智能体完成长周期交互任务,需兼顾快速模仿与奖励驱动改进。在线蒸馏(OPD)提供密集教师指导,初期提升快,但性能接近教师后增长停滞;强化学习(RL)直接优化环境奖励,鼓励探索以突破性能上限,但反馈稀疏延迟,早期学习效率低。本文提出ATOD(Annealed Turn-aware On-policy Distillation),一种融合两者优势的混合在线蒸馏算法:(1) 采用渐进式OPD-RL调度,早期以OPD为主逼近教师行为,后期逐步增强RL驱动探索;(2) 引入逐回合分歧-不确定性重加权(T-DUR),对长轨迹中分歧或不确定度高的回合强化蒸馏信号。在ALFWorld、WebShop和Search-QA上的实验表明,ATOD持续优于对比基线:三种学生规模下,平均成功率较OPD提升4.16点,较GRPO提升23.62点,且超越对应教师模型2.16点。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Training small language-model agents for long-horizon interactive tasks requires both fast imitation and reward-driven improvement. On-policy distillation (OPD) provides dense teacher guidance and typically improves rapidly in the early stage, but its gains saturate once the student approaches the teacher, limiting the final performance ceiling. Reinforcement learning (RL) directly optimizes environment rewards and encourages exploratory improvement toward a higher reward-defined ceiling, but sparse and delayed feedback makes early-stage learning much less efficient than OPD. In this paper, we propose ATOD (Annealed Turn-aware On-policy Distillation), a hybrid online distillation algorithm that explicitly exploits this complementarity. (1) ATOD uses an annealed OPD-RL schedule: OPD dominates early training to approach teacher-level behavior, while RL is gradually strengthened to drive reward-based exploration. (2) ATOD introduces Turn-level Disagreement-Uncertainty Reweighting (T-DUR), which softly gates the distillation sig- nal to prioritize turns with high disagreement or uncertainty in long trajectories. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-QA show that ATOD consistently outperforms competing post-training baselines: across the three student sizes, ATOD improves average success rate by 4.16 points over OPD and 23.62 points over GRPO, while surpassing the corresponding teacher models by 2.16 points.
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