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arXiv 提交日期: 2026-07-06
📄 Abstract - Weak-to-Strong Generalization via Direct On-Policy Distillation

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a powerful recipe for improving language-model reasoning, but it is expensive to repeat on every new strong model because the target model must generate many rollouts during training. As models scale, post-training itself becomes a bottleneck. We study a weak-to-strong alternative: run RL on a smaller model where rollouts are cheaper, then reuse what that RL run learned to improve a stronger target model. Directly distilling the post-RL weak teacher is not enough, because the teacher's final policy mixes useful RL gains with the limitations of the smaller model. We propose Direct On-Policy Distillation (Direct-OPD), which transfers the teacher's RL-induced policy shift instead. Direct-OPD compares the post-RL teacher with its own pre-RL reference and treats their log-ratio as a dense implicit reward for the student. In plain terms, the checkpoint pair tells us which actions RL made the weak model more or less likely to take, and Direct-OPD applies that signal on the stronger student's own on-policy states. This directly reuses the weak model's RL supervision signal without running sparse-reward RL on the target model. Empirically, Direct-OPD consistently leverages weaker teachers to improve stronger target models; notably, it boosts Qwen3-1.7B from 48.3% to 58.3% on AIME 2024 in just 4 hours on 8 A100 GPUs. It outperforms step-matched direct RL and enables the sequential composition of multiple policy shifts. Our results show that RL outcomes can be reused across model scales as implicit reward signals, not merely as final models to imitate.

顶级标签: reinforcement learning llm model training
详细标签: knowledge distillation policy shift weak-to-strong generalization reward reuse reasoning 或 搜索:

基于直接在线策略蒸馏的弱到强泛化方法 / Weak-to-Strong Generalization via Direct On-Policy Distillation


1️⃣ 一句话总结

本文提出一种名为Direct-OPD的方法,通过让大语言模型模仿小模型在强化学习前后行为的变化趋势,而非直接复制小模型的最终策略,从而低成本地将小模型的推理能力迁移给大模型。

源自 arXiv: 2607.05394