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ARXIV:2602.12125 · REINFORCEMENT LEARNING · SUBMITTED 02 APR · 02:30 UTC · FRESHNESS STALE
ARXIV:2602.12125REINFORCEMENT LEARNINGSUBMITTED 02 APR · 02:30 UTCFRESHNESS STALEarXiv
Develop a tool for enhanced on-policy distillation in reinforcement learning by leveraging reward extrapolation techniques for improved student performance.
Opportunity summary
Pain Develop a tool for enhanced on-policy distillation in reinforcement learning by leveraging reward extrapolation techniques for improved student performance.
Evidence 0 refs | 0 sources | 17% coverage
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Develop a tool for enhanced on-policy distillation in reinforcement learning by leveraging reward extrapolation techniques for improved student performance. In this work, we first theoretically show that OPD is a special case of dense…
On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns the student with the teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories, has demonstrated strong empirical gains in improving student performance and often outperforms off-policy distillation and reinforcement learning (RL) paradigms.…
ScienceToStartup currently rates this 5.0/10 on the public viability pass. In this work, we first theoretically show that OPD is a special case of dense KL-constrained RL where the reward function and the KL…
Reinforcement Learning moved forward this cycle; last verified April 2026. Public score 5.0/10.
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Develop a tool for enhanced on-policy distillation in reinforcement learning by leveraging reward extrapolation techniques for improved student performance.
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10.48550/arXiv.2602.12125Develop a tool for enhanced on-policy distillation in reinforcement learning by leveraging reward extrapolation techniques for improved student performance.
Abstract
On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns the student with the teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories, has demonstrated strong empirical gains in improving student performance and often outperforms off-policy distillation and reinforcement learning (RL) paradigms. In this work, we first theoretically show that OPD is a special case of dense KL-constrained RL where the reward function and the KL regularization are always weighted equally and the reference model can by any model. Then, we propose the Generalized On-Policy Distillation (G-OPD) framework, which extends the standard OPD objective by introducing a flexible reference model and a reward scaling factor that controls the relative weight of the reward term against the KL regularization. Through comprehensive experiments on math reasoning and code generation tasks, we derive two novel insights: (1) Setting the reward scaling factor to be greater than 1 (i.e., reward extrapolation), which we term ExOPD, consistently improves over standard OPD across a range of teacher-student size pairings. In particular, in the setting where we merge the knowledge from different domain experts, obtained by applying domain-specific RL to the same student model, back into the original student, ExOPD enables the student to even surpass the teacher's performance boundary and outperform the domain teachers. (2) Building on ExOPD, we further find that in the strong-to-weak distillation setting (i.e., distilling a smaller student from a larger teacher), performing reward correction by choosing the reference model as the teacher's base model before RL yields a more accurate reward signal and further improves distillation performance. However, this choice assumes access to the teacher's pre-RL variant and incurs more computational overhead. We hope our work offers new insights for future research on OPD.
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PROBLEM
Develop a tool for enhanced on-policy distillation in reinforcement learning by leveraging reward extrapolation techniques for improved student performance. In this work, we first theoretically show that OPD is a special case of dense KL-constrained RL where the reward function...
METHOD
On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns the student with the teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories, has demonstrated strong empirical gains in improving student performance and often outperforms off-policy distillation and reinforcement learning (RL)...
RESULT
ScienceToStartup currently rates this 5.0/10 on the public viability pass. In this work, we first theoretically show that OPD is a special case of dense KL-constrained RL where the reward function and the KL regularization are always weighted equally and the reference model can...
WHY NOW
Reinforcement Learning moved forward this cycle; last verified April 2026. Public score 5.0/10.
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Develop a tool for enhanced on-policy distillation in reinforcement learning by leveraging reward extrapolation techniques for improved student performance. In this work, we first theoretically show that OPD is a special case of dense KL-constrained RL where the reward function and the KL regularization are always weighted equally and the reference model can by any model.
Abstract-backed fallback claim; anchored extraction has not materialized a public claim row yet.
partial
On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns the student with the teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories, has demonstrated strong empirical gains in improving student performance and often outperforms off-policy distillation and reinforcement learning (RL) paradigms. In this work, we first theoretically show that OPD is a special case of dense KL-constrained RL where the reward function and the KL regularization are always weighted equally and the reference model can by any model.
Abstract-backed fallback claim; anchored extraction has not materialized a public claim row yet.
partial
ScienceToStartup currently rates this 5.0/10 on the public viability pass. In this work, we first theoretically show that OPD is a special case of dense KL-constrained RL where the reward function and the KL regularization are always weighted equally and the reference model can by any model.
Abstract-backed fallback claim; anchored extraction has not materialized a public claim row yet.
partial
Reinforcement Learning moved forward this cycle; last verified April 2026. Public score 5.0/10.
Abstract-backed fallback claim; anchored extraction has not materialized a public claim row yet.
partial
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Develop a tool for enhanced on-policy distillation in reinforcement learning by leveraging reward extrapolation techniques for improved student performance.
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