Adaptive-Policy Distillation: Knowledge Injection under Information Asymmetry
Hojun Cho, Kang Eun Jeon, Jaegul Choo
Abstract
On-policy distillation (OPD), which uses reverse-KL supervision on student rollouts to transfer a context-conditioned model's behavior into student model parameters for closed-book inference, has shown strong results. However, we find that this success does not translate to knowledge injection: across two document-QA benchmarks, OPD injects document knowledge far less efficiently than simple off-policy distillation. We trace this reversal to two failures that are structural, yet sparse across token positions. Reverse KL weights its gradient by the student distribution and therefore barely lifts document-specific tokens the student considers unlikely; after forward KL restores this signal, student rollouts expose later positions on the target trajectory only after generating the preceding tokens correctly, so coverage deteriorates with target length. Motivated by the concentration of teacher-student divergence at these hard positions, we propose Adaptive-Policy Distillation (APD), whose per-token gate jointly shifts the rollout toward the teacher and the objective toward forward KL where needed, withdrawing both interventions as the student learns. Without labels or a verifier, APD improves over OPD by up to 54.6%, achieving the best scores of 0.558 F1 on QASPER and 0.486 MRR on BioASQ.