arxivcs.LGcs.AI2026-07-31
SAF-OPD: Stable Advantage Fusion for On-Policy Distillation
Yifan Ding, Xincheng Wei, Yoshua Y. Li, Ziheng Li, Yuquan Lu, Siyu Zhang, et al.
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) broadcasts a single response-level reward to every token, while on-policy distillation (OPD) scores each token against a stronger teacher for a dense advantage but caps performance at teacher quality and discourages exploratio…