arXiv:2608.07935cs.LG2026-08

通过分离监督路径提升语言模型自蒸馏的稳定性与效果。

Adaptive Supervised Anchoring for On-Policy Self-Distillation

论文配图:Adaptive Supervised Anchoring for On-Policy Self-Distillation
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 将自蒸馏分为轨迹条件与标准上下文两种监督路径
  • 在冷启动阶段强化标准上下文监督,随轨迹质量提升逐步放松
  • 在多规模模型和推理任务中实现更优的可塑性-稳定性平衡

在策略自蒸馏(OPSD)中,学生模型通过采样轨迹从冻结教师模型获取指导。然而其有效性高度依赖轨迹质量。我们发现当学生轨迹偏离目标路径时,基于非目标前缀的教师输出会严重削弱任务相关监督。控制性前缀污染实验揭示了这一失败模式,称为轨迹条件信号退化。为此,我们提出统一训练框架,分离两种互补监督路径:第一种保留轨迹条件分布匹配,提供学生实际访问状态的指导;第二种在标准真实上下文中施加监督交叉熵,避免将目标词强行施加于错误的前缀。通过逐标记的轨迹-目标对齐动态调整标准上下文锚点强度,在冷启动阶段增强、随轨迹质量提升逐步松弛。在多个模型规模、两类任务及通用推理基准上的实验表明,该方法在提升任务学习能力的同时保持通用能力,实现更优的可塑性-稳定性权衡。研究指出上下文质量是策略自蒸馏的核心瓶颈,并证明分离轨迹条件引导与标准监督的价值。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) adapts a language model by distilling guidance from a frozen teacher on trajectories sampled from the student. Its effectiveness, however, depends critically on the quality of those trajectories. We show that when student rollouts drift from target trajectories, conditioning the teacher on off-target prefixes substantially weakens its task-relevant supervision. Controlled prefix-corruption experiments expose this failure mode, which we term rollout-conditioned signal degradation. To address this problem, we propose a unified training framework that separates two complementary supervision pathways. The first retains rollout-conditioned distribution matching, providing guidance on states the student actually visits. The second applies supervised cross-entropy on canonical ground-truth contexts, avoiding the incompatibility of imposing target tokens on erroneous rollout prefixes. Token-level rollout-target alignment is used to adapt the strength of the canonical-context anchor, emphasizing it during cold start and relaxing it as rollout quality improves. Experiments across multiple model scales, two task families, and general-reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed approach improves task acquisition over OPSD while preserving general capabilities, resulting in a more favorable empirical plasticity-stability trade-off. These findings identify context quality as a central bottleneck in on-policy self-distillation and demonstrate the value of separating rollout-conditioned guidance from canonical supervision.

自蒸馏语言模型强化学习稳定训练

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