AsyncOPD:异步在线策略蒸馏中的陈旧性问题研究
阅读原文· arxiv.org在线策略蒸馏异步训练中,轨迹生成与学习器更新解耦引入陈旧策略数据;KL方向决定影响:教师加权正向KL鲁棒,学生加权反向KL脆弱。异步RL稳定方法无效,反向计算当前学生信号更优。有限教师分数缓存导致稀疏采样反向KL估计器的偏差-方差权衡,多采样蒙特卡洛可降低方差。基于此,开源AsyncOPD全异步管道在严格同步训练基础上实现1.6至3.8倍吞吐量提升,精度相当。
On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts guided by teacher feedback and is becoming increasingly important for large language model (LLM) post-training. Like reinforcement learning (RL), however, OPD faces an on-policy systems bottleneck, as rollouts can dominate training time for reasoning workloads. Asynchronous training pipelines can alleviate this bottleneck by decoupling rollout generation from learner updates, but doing so introduces stale-policy data. While prior work has studied stale data in asynchronous RL, its effects in OPD remain underexplored. We present the first systematic study of staleness in asynchronous OPD, focusing on a practical setting where teacher feedback is implemented through local KL losses and full-vocabulary teacher logits are too expensive to store or transfer, necessitating finite teacher-score caches. We first show that KL direction changes the stale-data problem: teacher-weighted forward KL is more robust to stale rollouts, whereas student-weighted reverse KL is vulnerable. Second, for this vulnerable reverse-KL case, we study whether methods designed to stabilize asynchronous RL can mitigate OPD staleness. In our experiments, they do not improve over a simpler OPD-specific surrogate: recomputing the reverse-KL signal under the current student at learner time. Third, we analyze how finite teacher-score caches create a bias-variance tradeoff for sparse and sampled reverse-KL OPD estimators. This motivates multi-sample Monte Carlo (MC), which preserves MC correctability while reducing one-sample variance. Finally, we present and open-source AsyncOPD, a fully asynchronous OPD training pipeline built from these estimator choices. Experiments show that AsyncOPD improves training throughput by 1.6times to 3.8times over strict synchronous training while reaching comparable accuracy.