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Data-free On-policy Distillation

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 12, 2026 · UTC

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a standard component of frontier post-training pipelines, yet how much its training data actually contributes has gone largely unexamined. On the two teacher-student pairings most common in practice, we find OPD almost indifferent to its data: eight prompts already match a 17k-problem dataset, and three independently built datasets whose difficulty and teacher-student KL differ several-fold produce nearly indistinguishable training curves. Two causes account for this. First, the unit of data in OPD is the state a prompt leads to, not the prompt itself: a

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