arXiv:2607.26246cs.LG2026-07被引 4

用多个弱模型蒸馏出强学生,突破传统只能从更强模型学习的限制。

Weak-to-Strong On-Policy Distillation

论文配图:Weak-to-Strong On-Policy Distillation
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 构建弱模型对比对,通过日志空间差值提取能力方向作为代理教师
  • 在4个数学和3个代码基准上超越教师模型表现,且所有监督源均弱于学生
  • 适合需要从低成本小模型提升大模型性能的研究者,尤其擅长推理能力增强

基于策略的蒸馏(OPD)通过让学生在自身轨迹上对齐教师的词级分布,实现大模型间能力迁移。现有方法依赖至少比学生更强的教师:要么将大模型蒸馏到小模型,无法应对无更大教师的前沿场景;要么融合多个领域专家,需在学生规模上进行昂贵训练。本文提出弱到强基于策略的蒸馏(W2S-OPD),仅用多个更小、更廉价的弱模型即可提升强学生。W2S-OPD在日志空间中构造一个代理教师,通过正负模型对比对的输出差异,提取出能力方向,并将其叠加至学生基模型上,确保代理教师与学生分布相近。学生随后在其自身生成轨迹上最小化每词反向KL散度来蒸馏该代理教师。我们设计三种对比对:1)强化学习前后模型,分离强化学习带来的技能;2)大小基模型对比,分离规模带来的能力;3)正确与错误提示的小基模型,分离解题方向。在四个数学和三个代码基准上,W2S-OPD优于传统OPD,使学生超越领域教师,并在所有监督源均弱于学生的情况下仍持续提升。分析表明,不同对比对提供不同信号:强化学习与提示对比强调推理框架,规模对比强调求解过程。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns a student with the teacher's token-level distribution on the student's own rollouts, is an effective paradigm for transferring capabilities across LLMs. Prevailing approaches assume a teacher at least as capable as the student: they either distill a larger model into a smaller one, which fails at the frontier where no larger teacher exists, or consolidate multiple domain experts trained from a shared base, which requires costly training at the student's scale. We introduce Weak-to-Strong On-Policy Distillation (W2S-OPD), a simple yet effective OPD framework that improves the strong student by distilling from multiple weak models. W2S-OPD constructs a proxy teacher in logit space from a contrast pair of a positive and a negative model, both smaller than the student and cheap to obtain. Their logit difference isolates the capability direction, which is added to the student's own base model, yielding a proxy teacher that couples this direction while staying distributionally adjacent to the student. The student then distills it by minimizing the per-token reverse KL on its own rollouts. We instantiate the contrast pair as i) a post-RL expert against its pre-RL initialization, isolating the skill RL instills, ii) a larger against a smaller base model, isolating the capability from scale, and iii) a small base model with correct versus wrong hints, isolating the instance-level direction toward the solution. Across four math and three code benchmarks, W2S-OPD outperforms OPD, enables the student to surpass the domain teacher, and keeps improving the student even when every supervision source is weaker. Analysis shows different contrasts yield distinct signals: the post-RL and hint contrasts emphasize reasoning frameworks, while the scale contrast emphasizes the solving procedure. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Yu-Fangxu/W2S-OPD.

大模型蒸馏强化学习推理增强知识迁移

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