Divergence-Routed On-Policy Distillation for Language Models

Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) transfers knowledge from a teacher model to a student along student-generated trajectories, typically by minimizing the reverse Kullback-Leibler (RKL) divergence. However, RKL can provide weak corrective signals for teacher-supported tokens to which the student assigns very low probability. This raises two questions: which positions are most consequential for the behavioral gap between the student and teacher, and what additional supervision is needed at these positions? Through cross-sampling, we find that divergence-based routing more effectively pinpoints positions contributing to the teacher-student performance gap than entropy-based routing. Further analysis reveals teacher-mode under-coverage at high Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence positions, where standard OPD increases the large teacher-student probability gaps. Motivated by these findings, we propose Divergence-Routed On-Policy Distillation (DrOPD). DrOPD retains RKL supervision at all positions and selectively adds forward Kullback-Leibler (FKL) divergence supervision at positions with high JS divergence. Experiments across six math benchmarks show that DrOPD improves over standard OPD and entropy-based routing. DrOPD also reduces severe under-coverage cases by 37.9 percent relative to OPD, supporting targeted FKL as an effective complement to OPD.