Co-Evolving Policy Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Gu, Naibin, Yang, Chenxu, Si, Qingyi, Qin, Chuanyu, Yao, Dingyu, Fu, Peng, Lin, Zheng, Wang, Weiping, Duan, Nan, Wang, Jiaqi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866917448449523712
author Gu, Naibin
Yang, Chenxu
Si, Qingyi
Qin, Chuanyu
Yao, Dingyu
Fu, Peng
Lin, Zheng
Wang, Weiping
Duan, Nan
Wang, Jiaqi
author_facet Gu, Naibin
Yang, Chenxu
Si, Qingyi
Qin, Chuanyu
Yao, Dingyu
Fu, Peng
Lin, Zheng
Wang, Weiping
Duan, Nan
Wang, Jiaqi
contents RLVR and OPD have become standard paradigms for post-training. We provide a unified analysis of these two paradigms in consolidating multiple expert capabilities into a single model, identifying capability loss in different ways: mixed RLVR suffers from inter-capability divergence cost, while the pipeline of first training experts and then performing OPD, though avoiding divergence, fails to fully absorb teacher capabilities due to large behavioral pattern gaps between teacher and student. We propose Co-Evolving Policy Distillation (CoPD), which encourages parallel training of experts and introduces OPD during each expert's ongoing RLVR training rather than after complete expert training, with experts serving as mutual teachers (making OPD bidirectional) to co-evolve. This enables more consistent behavioral patterns among experts while maintaining sufficient complementary knowledge throughout. Experiments validate that CoPD achieves all-in-one integration of text, image, and video reasoning capabilities, significantly outperforming strong baselines such as mixed RLVR and MOPD, and even surpassing domain-specific experts. The model parallel training pattern offered by CoPD may inspire a novel training scaling paradigm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_27083
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Co-Evolving Policy Distillation
Gu, Naibin
Yang, Chenxu
Si, Qingyi
Qin, Chuanyu
Yao, Dingyu
Fu, Peng
Lin, Zheng
Wang, Weiping
Duan, Nan
Wang, Jiaqi
Machine Learning
RLVR and OPD have become standard paradigms for post-training. We provide a unified analysis of these two paradigms in consolidating multiple expert capabilities into a single model, identifying capability loss in different ways: mixed RLVR suffers from inter-capability divergence cost, while the pipeline of first training experts and then performing OPD, though avoiding divergence, fails to fully absorb teacher capabilities due to large behavioral pattern gaps between teacher and student. We propose Co-Evolving Policy Distillation (CoPD), which encourages parallel training of experts and introduces OPD during each expert's ongoing RLVR training rather than after complete expert training, with experts serving as mutual teachers (making OPD bidirectional) to co-evolve. This enables more consistent behavioral patterns among experts while maintaining sufficient complementary knowledge throughout. Experiments validate that CoPD achieves all-in-one integration of text, image, and video reasoning capabilities, significantly outperforming strong baselines such as mixed RLVR and MOPD, and even surpassing domain-specific experts. The model parallel training pattern offered by CoPD may inspire a novel training scaling paradigm.
title Co-Evolving Policy Distillation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27083