Do As I Do, Not As I Say: On-Policy Distillation Inherits the Teacher in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2610.20989 · cs.LG, cs.CV · Submitted 2026-10-14 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG, cs.CV

Submitted: 2026-10-14

Updated: 2026-10-14

Comments: 27 pages, 7 figures, 21 tables. Code: https://github.com/ffy208/opd-inherits-teacher-vlm

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• On-Policy Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Policy distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Vision-language models — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

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