Distill What the Student Can See: Fisher-Projected On-Policy Distillation for Vision-Language Models

On-policy distillation (OPD) samples trajectories from the current student policy and minimizes token-level divergence between student and teacher next-token distributions at prefixes along those trajectories. This aligns the distillation states with the student's own generation distribution. However, it still assumes that the complete teacher distribution is an appropriate target across student capacities. In vision--language reasoning, teacher corrections can depend on visual distinctions that

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ethics.ai (2 August 2026), “Distill What the Student Can See: Fisher-Projected On-Policy Distillation for Vision-Language Models,” evidence record 16157, https://ethics.ai/record/16157 (originally published by arXiv cs.LG).

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