Rethinking Black-Box On-Policy Distillation: A Rubric-based Analysis

arXiv:2605.07396v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) is a powerful paradigm for LLM post-training, yet its reliance on teacher logits restricts it to white-box teachers. In this paper, we study whether rubric-based supervision can provide a text-only feedback interface for black-box OPD, and what makes it effective. Our instantiation, Rubric-based On-Policy Distillation (ROPD), induces rubrics by contrasting teacher responses with the student's current rollouts and uses them to score these rollouts for on-policy optimization. We find that, under matched settin

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