DTDD: Divergence-Triggered Dynamic Distillation for Reliable On-Policy Supervision

Abstract:On-policy distillation (OPD) provides dense token-level supervision on student rollouts, but this supervision can become unreliable when the student and teacher diverge, either because of a large initial policy gap or compounding errors in long-horizon reasoning and tool use. We introduce Divergence-Triggered Dynamic Distillation (DTDD), an adaptive OPD framework that uses segment-level student-teacher divergence to trigger teacher takeover during training. When divergence triggers an intervention during reasoning, the student prefix continues to receive standard OPD supervision. The teacher then generates a recovery suffix, which the student learns through behavior cloning, using cross-entropy on the teacher-generated tokens. We evaluate DTDD in three regimes: long-horizon reasoning, distillation from a base initialization without offline supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and multi-turn agents. We also compare alternative trigger designs and teacher-intervention rates. DTDD reduces the post-warmup peak gradient norm by $8.6\times$ and, from a base initialization, reaches $21.3\%$ held-out math accuracy in $2.6\times$ fewer optimizer updates than OPD; both methods finish near $22\%$. It improves best-observed performance by $4.8$ and $4.1$ percentage points on ALFWorld with LoRA and agentic code, respectively. Ablations show that segment-averaged triggers outperform token-spike triggers. Behavior cloning is also more effective than the tested OPD surrogate for training teacher-generated recoveries. Across 23 experimental arms, takeover tends to help when the teacher substantially outperforms the OPD-trained student, provided that the teacher can recover from student-visited states, the student can learn those recoveries, and teacher intervention is neither excessive nor insufficient.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.19302 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.19302v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.19302 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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