ToolOPD: Credit-Aware On-Policy Distillation for Tool-Use Agents

Abstract

On-policy distillation (OPD) enhances the capabilities of small language agents by providing dense, token-level supervision from a teacher model on student-generated trajectories. However, standard OPD implicitly assumes that credit is uniformly distributed across long-horizon trajectories, assigning the same strength of teacher supervision to different actions. Through credit-distribution analysis and outcome-reversal counterfactual experiments, we find that trajectory credit is concentrated on a small number of critical actions. Moreover, even when the trajectory is held fixed, reversing only the final outcome substantially changes the credit assigned to multiple interaction turns. These findings show that the uniform-credit assumption fails to identify critical decisions and ultimately degrades the model's reasoning accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose ToolOPD, an outcome-aware on-policy distillation framework designed for long-horizon tool use. ToolOPD first summarizes each completed trajectory and its outcome into a reusable hindsight skill. It then measures how this skill changes the teacher's probability of each student action token and converts the change into outcome-aware credit. The resulting credit preserves supervision that supports successful decisions or discourages failed ones, while suppressing irrelevant and conflicting signals. ToolOPD uses these credits to reweight the action-level distillation loss and jointly optimizes it with reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments across multiple long-horizon tool interaction benchmarks demonstrate that ToolOPD significantly outperforms existing reinforcement learning and self-distillation baselines.