Direct-OPD Paper: 7B Model Boosts AIME Score by 6.4% Using 1.5B Policy Shift

_lewtun · x · 2026-08-12

This post shares the paper link for Direct On-Policy Distillation (Direct-OPD), developed by a joint lab of Tsinghua AIR and ByteDance Seed.

The text details the experimental setup: using pre- and post-RL checkpoints of a 1.5B model as a teacher pair to distill the policy shift into a 7B student model.

Results show that even though the 7B student initially scores higher (56.7) than the post-RL 1.5B teacher (51.3), vanilla distillation degrades the student. However, Direct-OPD successfully transfers the RL gains, pushing the 7B model's score to 63.1 on AIME24.

Related event: Tsinghua and ByteDance Propose Direct-OPD for Model Distillation(3 posts)→

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