Pass the Baton: Trajectory-Relayed On-Policy Distillation
Quick summary
arXiv:2607.26057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) grounds token-level supervision in the student's own trajectory, yet suffers from prefix failure: once the student commits to a wrong reasoning direction, all subsequent generation builds on this deviation, producing misdirected continuations that elicit unreliable supervision and waste compute. We identify a teacher-student continuation asymmetry on failed prefixes, where the teacher tends to redirect while the student continues along the original direction, and convert it into a label-free handoff trigger in Relay
Key takeaways
- arXiv:2607.26057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) grounds token-level supervision in the student's own trajectory, yet suffers from prefix failure: once the student commits to a wrong reasoning direction, all subsequent generation builds on this deviation, producing misdirected continuations that elicit unreliable supervision and waste compute.
- We identify a teacher-student continuation asymmetry on failed prefixes, where the teacher tends to redirect while the student continues along the original direction, and convert it into a label-free handoff trigger in Relay
Why it matters
The significance is not only the legal text but how it changes product design. Decisions around “Pass the Baton: Trajectory-Relayed On-Policy Distillation” may reshape data collection, model training, output accountability and market access.