让学生模型避开老师误导,只学真正有用的推理信号。
When Teachers Mislead: Spurious-Signal-Aware On-Policy Distillation

- 通过判断输出是否依赖输入来识别虚假监督信号
- 在大语言模型和视觉语言模型上均显著提升性能
- 适合需要可靠知识迁移的模型压缩与训练场景
基于策略的蒸馏(OPD)通过密集的词元级教师信号指导学生采样轨迹。现有选择性方法虽能优先处理可信、信息量大或可学习的信号,但忽略了语言模型一个根本缺陷:其词元级判断常受输入无关的语言先验、格式惯例或刻板推理模板驱动,而非任务相关证据。这类优化相关的弱输入锚定信号称为伪信号,在OPD中可能引发大梯度却无实际提升作用。为此,本文提出SA-OPD框架,通过轻量级输入锚定性代理评估词元信号是否真正依赖输入,并仅过滤同时具备低输入锚定性和极端蒸馏偏差的词元,从而消除高影响的伪更新,实现细粒度优化。在大型语言模型与视觉语言模型上的大量实验表明,SA-OPD持续优于原始OPD及主流选择性方法。结果证实输入锚定性是选择蒸馏监督的关键维度,提供了一种简单有效的伪更新抑制策略。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
On-Policy distillation (OPD) transfers teacher capabilities by supervising student-sampled trajectories with dense token-level teacher signals. Recent selective OPD methods improve this process by prioritizing signals that are confident, informative, or learnable. However, the assumptions overlook a fundamental failure mode of language models: their token-level judgments can be driven by input-agnostic language priors, formatting conventions, or stereotyped reasoning templates rather than task-specific evidence. We refer to such optimization-relevant but weakly input-grounded supervision as spurious signals in OPD, which may produce large gradients while contributing little task-improving direction. To mitigate this issue, we propose SA-OPD, a Spurious-Signal-Aware On-Policy Distillation framework that identifies and filters misleading token-level supervision based on input-groundedness and optimization impact. SA-OPD introduces a lightweight input-groundedness proxy estimating whether a token-level distillation signal truly depends on the input. It then filters only tokens that simultaneously exhibit low input-groundedness and extreme distillation divergence, thereby removing high-impact spurious updates and achieving fine-grained OPD optimization. Extensive experiments on both large language model (LLM) and vision-language model (VLM) settings demonstrate that SA-OPD consistently outperforms Vanilla OPD and competitive selective methods. These results establish input-groundedness as a key dimension for OPD supervision selection and offer a simple, effective strategy for mitigating spurious updates.
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