Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation for Flow-Based Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract

Specialized vision-language-action (VLA) policies acquire strong domain-specific skills, yet consolidating these skills into one shared policy remains challenging. On-policy distillation (OPD) transfers teacher knowledge on inputs induced by the student, addressing the distribution mismatch encountered during deployment. For flow-based VLAs, this mismatch arises at two levels: environment observations and intermediate action-generation states. We propose a two-level on-policy distillation framework that couples student-driven environment interaction with teacher velocity supervision along student-generated action flow trajectories. Frozen domain specialists jointly supervise one student. After each update, the student collects new environment experience and generates fresh action-flow trajectories. Starting from a joint supervised fine-tuning (SFT) initialization, Velocity Loss OPD yields absolute success-rate gains of 22.55% on LIBERO-40, 33.4% on CALVIN five-instruction sequences, and 22.6% on Meta-World MT50. Compared with Action Loss OPD and Teacher-rollout SFT, it achieves absolute success-rate gains of 6.4-9.5% on LIBERO-40, 9.7-18.3% on CALVIN, and 3.2-4.2% on Meta-World MT50. Analysis by sequence length further shows larger success-rate gains on longer CALVIN sequences. These results demonstrate effective multi-domain capability consolidation through two-level on-policy supervision, with a single student deployed across domains.