用更弱的AI教更强的AI,反而教得更好
我们默认AI只能向更强的老师学,但前沿模型已经没有更强的老师了。这篇论文反着来:用两个都比学生弱的模型当老师,一个答对、一个答错,两者的差异恰好指向正确答案的方向,把这个方向叠加到学生自己身上,再让学生在自己的输出上对齐。在4个数学和3个代码基准上,这种弱师蒸馏不仅超过了传统强师蒸馏,还能让学生超过领域老师,甚至所有监督源都更弱时依然有效。它不是你明天能用上的,但它暗示了一个反直觉的事实:AI的进步不一定靠更强的老师,靠的是把“对与错之间的差异”提炼出来。
📄 原文摘要(英文)
On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns a student with the teacher's token-level distribution on the student's own rollouts, is an effective paradigm for transferring capabilities across LLMs. Prevailing approaches assume a teacher at least as capable as the student: they either distill a larger model into a smaller one, which fails at the frontier where no larger teacher exists, or consolidate multiple domain experts trained from a shared base, which requires costly training at the student's scale. We introduce Weak-to-Strong On-Policy Distillation (W2S-OPD), a simple yet effective OPD framework that improves the strong student by distilling from multiple weak models. W2S-OPD constructs a proxy teacher in logit space from a contrast pair of a positive and a negative model, both smaller than the student and cheap to obtain. Their logit difference isolates the capability direction, which is added to the student's own base model, yielding a proxy teacher that couples this direction while staying distributionally adjacent to the student. The student then distills it by minimizing the per-token reverse KL on its own rollouts. We instantiate the contrast pair as i) a post-RL expert against its pre-RL initialization, isolating the skill RL instills, ii) a larger against a smaller base model, isolating the capability from scale, and iii) a small base model with correct versus wrong hints, isolating the instance-level direction toward the solution. Across four math and three code benchmarks, W2S-OPD outperforms OPD, enables the student to surpass the domain teacher, and keeps improving the student even when every supervision source is weaker. Analysis shows different contrasts yield distinct signals: the post-RL and hint contrasts emphasize reasoning frameworks, while the scale contrast emphasizes the solving procedure. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Yu-Fangxu/W2S-OPD.