Progressive OPD (POPD)

Are Full Rollouts Necessary for On-Policy Distillation?

This paper investigates whether full rollouts are required during on-policy distillation (OPD) for training reasoning models, identifying rollout horizon as a key computational bottleneck. The authors propose two strategies: Progressive OPD (POPD), which gradually expands rollout horizon during training, and Truncated OPD (TOPD), which uses permanently truncated rollouts. Experiments on mathematical reasoning show POPD achieves up to 3× training efficiency improvement, while TOPD matches full OPD performance using only 10% of the rollout horizon, yielding significant wall-clock and memory savings.