On the Off-Policy Teacher in On-Policy Distillation

Abstract:On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as a promising post-training paradigm in which the student learns from trajectories generated by its own policy under dense teacher supervision. However, OPD introduces a fundamental asymmetry: although the sampled trajectories are on-policy for the student, they are off-policy for the teacher. The teacher is typically optimized to continue from prefixes generated by its own policy, but during OPD it must instead supervise prefixes generated by the student. Empirically, we find that its continuation performance degrades as these prefixes grow longer. To address this issue, we propose Student-COnditioned Updates of the Teacher (SCOUT), a co-training framework that adapts the teacher to student-generated prefixes. Alongside standard OPD updates, SCOUT periodically optimizes the teacher's conditional ability using reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, where the teacher generates continuations from student prefixes and learns from outcome rewards. Controlled experiments show that SCOUT improves the teacher's ability to continue from student-generated prefixes, supporting the intended mechanism of student-conditioned teacher adaptation. Across multiple teacher--student configurations, model scales, and reasoning domains, SCOUT also consistently improves the effectiveness of on-policy distillation.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.38360 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2609.38360v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.38360 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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