Pass the Baton: Trajectory-Relayed On-Policy Distillation

AI Digest - ArXiv AI

Pass the Baton: Trajectory-Relayed On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) grounds token-level supervision in the student's own trajectory, yet suffers from prefix failure: once the student commits to a wrong reasoning direction, all subsequent generation builds on this deviation, producing misdirected continuations that elicit unreliable supervision and waste compute. We identify a teacher-student continuation asymmetry on failed prefixes, where the teacher tends to redirect while the student continues along the original direction, and con

Source: ArXiv AI