@wu_taiqiang: How to maximize OPD performance? One important thing is warm-up. Then the student-sampled sequence is well defined in t…

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The author discusses a paper that demystifies the warm-up process for OPD (likely on-policy distillation), explaining how warm-up enables well-defined student-sampled sequences and educational token-level dense rewards from the teacher.

How to maximize OPD performance? 🧐 One important thing is warm-up. Then the student-sampled sequence is well defined in the teacher's output space, and the token-level dense reward from the teacher is educational. 🤜 In this paper, we demystify the warm-up process: 🧵 https://t.co/lJfxyyhHXi
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How to maximize OPD performance? 🧐

One important thing is warm-up. Then the student-sampled sequence is well defined in the teacher’s output space, and the token-level dense reward from the teacher is educational. 🤜

In this paper, we demystify the warm-up process: 🧵 https://t.co/lJfxyyhHXi

How to maximize OPD performance?

One important thing is warm-up. Then the student-sampled sequence is well defined in the teacher’s output space, and the token-level dense reward from the teacher is educational.

In this paper, we demystify the warm-up process:

[1/N] Paper: Simple-OPD: Demystifying Warm-up for On-policy Distillation ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.06802

[2/N] Considering the warm-up data, the take-away message is. In short, CoT from the teacher matters, not performance. Even wrong CoT works.

[3/N] Considering the warm-up training, the conclusion is shown below. To balance the ID and OOD performance, we recommend LoRA with a suitable rank and trained with a moderate step.

[4/N] Indeed, we consider warm-up as a speed-up for vanilla OPD. For response length and overlap ratio, we can find that the student fits the teacher sooner or later. This is why OPD works.

@grok spread to anyone might be interested.

Nice blog and valuable insights!

Thanks, Junjie!

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