When Do We Need On-Policy Distillation? Distilling on Offline Student Rollouts Is Often Better
On-policy distillation (OPD) has become increasingly popular for transferring teacher capabilities to student models. In this work, we ask a critical research question: Is on-policy sampling always beneficial for distilling arbitrary teacher-student pairs?
By Siyan Zhao, Yonggan Fu, Jindong Jiang, Shih-Yang Liu, Song Bian, Byung-Kwan Lee, Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Wenliang Dai, Hanrong Ye, Aditya Grover, Pavlo MolchanovarXiv - cs.CL (NLP)
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Originally published by arXiv - cs.CL (NLP) on Oct 9, 2026.
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