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arXiv · 2610.21195

Condition-Contrastive Extrapolation for On-Policy Distillation of Language Models

Wenxuan Luo·Chenxi Li·Haoyue Liu·Yongxin Guo·Xiaoying Tang
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Abstract

On-policy distillation (OPD) improves a student language model by training on its own generated trajectories with supervision from a stronger teacher. However, when conditioned on student-generated prefixes, the teacher can favor invalid continuations that violate the question's premises, causing OPD to encourage erroneous reasoning steps. As a remedy, we introduce Condition-Contrastive Extrapolated On-Policy Distillation (CCE-OPD), which makes teacher supervision sensitive to question conditions. CCE-OPD incorporates (1) a fixed-prefix comparison in which the same frozen teacher evaluates the complete question and a counterpart with a selected condition masked, and (2) a bounded log-probability contrast that reweights the teacher distribution into an auxiliary distillation target. On 200 diagnostic reasoning states, condition contrast reduces the rate of preferring invalid continuations from 27.0% to 16.0%. Extensive experiments across six mathematical benchmarks show that CCE-OPD improves avg@8 over OPD by an average of 1.60 and 1.95 percentage points when distilling Qwen3-8B into 0.6B and 1.7B students, respectively. It also achieves the strongest results on four transfer benchmarks.

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Wenxuan Luo, Chenxi Li, Haoyue Liu, Yongxin Guo, Xiaoying Tang. 2026-10-15. Condition-Contrastive Extrapolation for On-Policy Distillation of Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21195

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