Weak-to-Strong Generalization via Direct On-Policy Distillation

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

Direct-OPD distills the policy shift from a small model's pre- and post-RL checkpoints to improve a larger student model via on-policy distillation, achieving significant gains without expensive RL on the student.

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.
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Paper page - Weak-to-Strong Generalization via Direct On-Policy Distillation

Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2607.05394 RLVR is powerful, but repeating it for every larger target model is expensive: each target must generate its own rollouts and rediscover useful learning signals from sparse outcome rewards.

Can RL on a small, weaker model improve a stronger student—even when the student already outperforms the small model after RL?

We found that it can—but not by distilling the weak model itself.

Today, we’re excited to share Direct-OPD, developed at SIA-Lab, a joint lab of Tsinghua AIR and ByteDance Seed. https://bytedtsinghua-sia.github.io/Direct-OPD/

Our alternative is simple:

  1. Run RL on a small model, where exploration and rollouts are cheaper.
  2. Treat the model’s pre- and post-RL checkpoints as a teacher pair, whose difference captures the direction learned through RL.
  3. On-policy distill this policy shift—what RL changed—using the stronger student’s own rollouts.

In one setting on AIME24: • 1.5B teacher pair: pre-RL and post-RL checkpoints (Post-RL teacher score: 51.3) • 7B student before transfer: 56.7 • 7B student + vanilla on-policy distillation: ~50 • 7B student + Direct-OPD: 63.1 (+6.4)

The 7B student already starts stronger than the post-RL teacher. Distilling the teacher itself makes the student worse. But distilling what the teacher pair learned through RL improves it further.

In other words, the reusable outcome of an RL run is not only the final checkpoint—it can also be the policy shift encoded by the pre- and post-RL checkpoint pair.

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