Condition-Contrastive Extrapolation for On-Policy Distillation of Language Models
arXiv:2610.21195v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) improves a student language model by training on its own generated trajectories with supervision from a stronger teacher. However, when conditioned on student-generated prefixes, the teacher can favor invalid continuations that violate the question's premises, causing OPD to encourage erroneous reasoning steps. As a remedy, we introduce Condition-Contrastive Extrapolated On-Policy Distillation (CCE-OPD), which makes te…