arxivcs.CLcs.LG2026-07-15
Demystifying On-Policy Distillation: Roles, Pathologies, and Regulations
Rui Wang, Hongru Wang, Yi Chen, Boyang Xue, Tianqing Fang, Wenhao Yu, et al.
On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a key paradigm in LLM post-training, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood. We present a systematic study examining the role, pathologies, and regulations of OPD. We first clarify the role of OPD as an exploration catalyst: it…