A Survey of On-Policy Distillation for Large Language Models

arXiv:2604.00626 · cs.LG, cs.CL · Submitted 2026-04-01 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG, cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-04-01

Updated: 2026-10-21

Comments: Work in Progress

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Distillation — 8× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Knowledge Distillation — 3× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• On-Policy Distillation — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Policy distillation — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Exposure Bias — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Failure Modes — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Scaling Laws — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes

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