Branching On-Policy Distillation

Abstract

On-policy distillation (OPD) provides teacher supervision on student-generated trajectories, but a single trajectory realizes only one continuation at each decision, limiting supervision coverage under a finite sampling budget. We propose BranchOPD (Branching On-Policy Distillation), which selects informative decision points using student uncertainty and teacher-student disagreement, resamples student-policy continuations from shared prefixes, and applies token-level teacher supervision to both main trajectories and branches. BranchOPD operates at token-level decisions in mathematics and within-turn decisions in agent tasks. Shared-prefix reuse reduces student-generated token costs by approximately 19% on ALFWorld and 31% on WebShop relative to seven independent trajectories. We also introduce protocol-boundary repair (PBR), which uses targeted supervision under protocol constraints to mitigate repetition and wasted generation. BranchOPD outperforms Vanilla OPD and Multi-Rollout OPD (n=7) across all evaluated benchmarks, with gains over Vanilla OPD of 18.55 percentage points in mean mathematics accuracy over 16 sampled answers (avg@16) and 13.8 points in mean ALFWorld ID/OOD success. Mechanistic analyses and selection ablations show that branching at uncertain decisions expands subsequent behavior coverage and outperforms random selection and turn-initial branching.