Machine Learning Algorithms & Natural Language Processing

Aug 24, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

When Online Distillation Goes Off‑Track: How Relay‑OPD Lets the Teacher Take Over at Critical Moments

The article analyzes the prefix‑failure problem in on‑policy distillation, introduces Relay‑OPD with a handoff trigger that lets a teacher model intervene locally, and shows through eight math‑reasoning benchmarks that this approach improves accuracy by up to 7.3% while cutting training trajectory length by more than half.