Reverse-KL Policy Distillation: Statistical Guarantees and Limits

Haolin Liu; Chen-Yu Wei; Julian Zimmert

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arXiv · 2610.30844

Reverse-KL Policy Distillation: Statistical Guarantees and Limits

Haolin Liu·Chen-Yu Wei·Julian Zimmert

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Abstract

Reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) distillation has shown empirical promise for training language models, but its statistical guarantees and limits remain poorly understood. In particular, the effects of two design choices remain unclear: Does access to the teacher's full action distribution provide an advantage over observing only the probability it assigns to the sampled action? Must training trajectories come from the student (online distillation), or can teacher-generated trajectories (offline distillation) suffice? Our work takes a first step toward understanding the theory underlying these questions. We study the sample complexity of online reverse-KL distillation under two feedback models: the teacher reveals either its full action distribution or only the probability of the student-generated action. We establish minimax bounds for the former and show that substantially more data may be required for the latter. In contrast, offline reverse-KL distillation can attain the same minimax rate whether the teacher reveals its full distribution or only its probability of the teacher-generated action. The key distinction is that teacher-generated actions themselves reveal the teacher's preferences, while queries at student-selected actions can leave those preferences unobserved. This highlights an additional statistical challenge for online distillation compared to offline distillation. These statistical guarantees do not follow simply from optimizing standard distillation objectives: our lower bounds show that common online objectives can fail when candidates are evaluated only on past student-generated trajectories. We develop trajectory-loss and importance-ratio truncation techniques together with policy-space learning to achieve optimal online distillation guarantees.

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BibTeX RIS

Haolin Liu, Chen-Yu Wei, Julian Zimmert. 2026-10-22. Reverse-KL Policy Distillation: Statistical Guarantees and Limits. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30844

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