Preprint
Aug 2026
A Token-Level Analysis of Sampled-Token Reverse-KL On-Policy Distillation
On-policy distillation (OPD) supervises a student on its own trajectories with token-level signals from a frozen teacher, yet how a sampled loss allocates updates across tokens remains poorly understood. We analyze the gradient of the per-token K2 estimator of reverse KL with respect to the student logits. The $\ell_1$...
Bing Shao, Jia-Zheng Zhang, Long Ma et al.
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