Decoupling KL and Trajectories: A Unified Perspective for SFT, DAgger, Offline RL, and OPD in LLM Distillation

Anhao Zhao, Haoran Xin, Yingqi Fan +3

Knowledge distillation is central to LLM post-training, yet its design space remains poorly understood, especially alongside reinforcement learning (RL). We show that the prevailin…