Paper Detail

Trust Region Policy Distillation

Zhengpeng Xie, Li Lyna Zhang, Zeke Xie, Mao Yang

huggingface Score 6.0

Published 2026-07-06 · First seen 2026-07-13

General AI

Abstract

Big goals are hard to achieve all at once; breaking them into small steps is wiser. We present Trust Region Policy Distillation (TOP-D), which transforms the notoriously unstable, high-variance On-Policy Distillation (OPD) into a stable training paradigm by dynamically constructing a proximal teacher. Theoretically, we establish a rigorous framework demonstrating that TOP-D inherently controls gradient variance. By providing a formal global convergence analysis alongside a monotonic improvement bound, we mathematically formalize the reliability and stability of the overall training dynamics. Empirically, TOP-D dramatically enhances training stability, sample efficiency, and final performance on mathematical reasoning tasks. More importantly, TOP-D introduces zero additional computational overhead, positioning itself as a promising alternative to the well-established OPD paradigm.

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BibTeX

@misc{xie2026trust,
  title = {Trust Region Policy Distillation},
  author = {Zhengpeng Xie and Li Lyna Zhang and Zeke Xie and Mao Yang},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Big goals are hard to achieve all at once; breaking them into small steps is wiser. We present Trust Region Policy Distillation (TOP-D), which transforms the notoriously unstable, high-variance On-Policy Distillation (OPD) into a stable training paradigm by dynamically constructing a proximal teacher. Theoretically, we establish a rigorous framework demonstrating that TOP-D inherently controls gradient variance. By providing a formal global convergence analysis alongside a monotonic improvement },
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2607.04751},
  keywords = {huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2607.04751},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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