Recovering Reliable Supervision via Critique-Guided On-Policy Distillation

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

提出 CriticOPD,通过让教师模型利用参考答案对错误的学生 rollout 进行批判、学生据此重写后续内容,从而恢复可靠的 on-policy 蒸馏监督信号,在六个数学推理基准上相比 OPD 平均提升 4 个百分点以上。

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its own rollouts with token-level supervision from a teacher, assuming that the teacher can reach a correct answer from any prefix the student writes. We call this property the recoverability of the teacher and show it fails on incorrect rollouts: the teacher follows student errors, although it recognizes them. We propose CriticOPD, using error recognition to restore recoverability. The teacher critiques an incorrect rollout, allowing the student to rewrite its solution following the error. The resulting output, including the critique as privileged information, is scored by the teacher while the student uses the revision without the critique for training. On two Qwen3 students and six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, CriticOPD improves OPD, with the largest gains on competition problems.
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Paper page - Recovering Reliable Supervision via Critique-Guided On-Policy Distillation

Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2610.20572 🤖CriticOPD: Recovering Reliable Supervision via Critique-Guided On-Policy Distillation

🔍**Key finding:**Teachers can recognize student mistakes yet still follow them when continuing a flawed solution, making OPD supervision unreliable.

✍️**Our approach:**The teacher uses the reference answer to critique incorrect student rollouts, and the student rewrites the continuation with this feedback. The teacher scores the rewritten suffix with the feedback in context, while the student learns from that suffix without seeing the feedback.

📈Results:Across six math reasoning benchmarks, CriticOPD improves average accuracy over OPD by4.57 percentage points on Qwen3-1.7Band4.06 on Qwen3-0.6B, with the largest gains on competition problems.

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