SEAD: Competence-Aware On-Policy Distillation via Entropy-Guided Supervision
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:SEAD: Competence-Aware On-Policy Distillation via Entropy-Guided Supervision
Abstract:On-policy distillation (OPD) has a property absent in offline distillation and RL: teacher supervision quality depends on student competence. Incoherent rollouts yield noisy gradients; already-mastered tokens yield redundant ones. This creates waste at three scales (tokens, training phases, and prompts) yet existing methods supervise uniformly. We introduce SEAD, which uses entropy as a unified probe of this competence-dependent degradation at three scales: (1) joint teacher-student entropy partitions tokens into zones receiving tailored divergences or zero gradient (approx. 50% skipped); (2) a cosine schedule anneals from forward to reverse KL as competence grows; (3) a competence-gated curriculum introduces prompts easy-to-hard. These components are symbiotically necessary: token selection requires coherent rollouts (curriculum), annealing requires monotonic improvement (also curriculum). On OLMo-3 (7B to 32B), SEAD achieves +4.8 avg accuracy over vanilla OPD across six math benchmarks, with ablations confirming super-additive interactions.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.28562 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2606.28562v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.28562
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
References & Citations
Bookmark
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language
-
GRPO, Dr. GRPO, and DAPO Are Three Operations on One Number: The Group-Standard-Deviation Identity
Jul 2
-
Testing Frontier Large Language Models' Physics Literacy in Parallel Physical Worlds
Jul 2
-
EPC: A Standardized Protocol for Measuring Evaluator Preference Dynamics in LLM Agent Systems
Jul 2
-
Mapping the Evaluation Frontier: An Empirical Survey of the Bias-Reliability Tradeoff Across Eleven Evaluator-Agent Conditions
Jul 2
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.