arXiv:2608.31046cs.LGcs.CL2026-08

OPD其实靠的是抑制低概率词,无需教师指导也能提升性能。

Does On-Policy Distillation Really Distill? From Noisy Teacher to Self-Improvement

论文配图:Does On-Policy Distillation Really Distill? From Noisy Teacher to Self-Improvement
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 学习集中在低概率词上,固定负优势即可达到教师监督效果
  • 提出无监督自适应方法OPSA,AIME24上提升35.41点(相对增益263%)
  • 适用于多种模型与任务,比OPD还高出16.77点,适合追求高效训练的场景

在策略蒸馏(OPD)中,教师对学生生成的轨迹进行评分,但这些轨迹对教师而言是离策略的,其监督可靠性存疑。我们定量分析发现,教师监督存在显著噪声,且随教师规模增大而加剧。令人意外的是,学生策略对噪声不敏感,无论是否保留噪声,最终性能相近。进一步分析表明,学习集中于低对数概率词,使用单一固定负优势即可达到教师提供的监督效果。这暗示OPD主要通过抑制低概率词实现提升,无需教师参与。为此,我们提出无监督自适应方法OPSA,基于熵自适应分配负优势,强化高熵位置的学习信号,抑制尾部词,均匀分配头部词的概率质量。相比基础模型Qwen3-1.7B,OPSA在AIME24上将Avg@32提升35.41点(相对增益263%),并在所有三个基准上使Pass@32翻倍以上;相较OPD,AIME24上仍领先16.77点。跨模型族与任务的大量实验验证了其有效性与泛化能力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

On-policy distillation (OPD) offers dense token-level supervision as an alternative to the sparse outcome-level advantages of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). However, the teacher scores student-generated trajectories that are inherently off-policy for it, so the reliability of its supervision, and hence the source of the student's improvement, remains unclear. We quantitatively analyze teacher supervision during OPD training and find substantial noise whose prevalence increases with teacher scale. Surprisingly, the student policy is insensitive to such noise, converging to comparable performance regardless of whether noisy supervision is retained or removed. Does OPD distill at all? By analyzing what drives its gains, we find that learning concentrates on low log-probability tokens, and using a single fixed negative advantage matches the performance of teacher-provided ones. This suggests that OPD works largely by suppressing low log-probability tokens, which requires no teacher. These findings motivate On-Policy Self-Adaptation (OPSA), a supervision-free method using entropy-adaptive negative advantages. It assigns stronger learning signals to high-entropy positions, suppressing tail tokens, and evenly redistributing probability mass among head tokens. Compared with the base \texttt{Qwen3-1.7B}, OPSA improves Avg@32 by 35.41 points on AIME24, corresponding to a 263\% relative gain, and more than doubles Pass@32 across all three benchmarks. It also outperforms OPD by 16.77 points in Avg@32 on AIME24. Extensive experiments and analyses across model families and tasks further demonstrate its effectiveness and generalizability.

强化学习策略蒸馏自适应优化无监督训练

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