Adaptive Pullback: Reweighting Supervision at Penalty Jumps in On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2610.28194v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) supervises student-generated responses using sampled-token student-teacher log-ratios. A positive log-ratio penalizes a token that the student assigns higher probability to than the teacher, but its current value does not distinguish sustained high penalties from abrupt increases along a response. We examine these local changes by comparing consecutive blocks of tokens within the same response. Our diagnostic identifies penalty jumps, abrupt increases in average penalty that persist on held-out tokens. Across these

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