Trust Region Policy Distillation

Zhengpeng Xie, Li Lyna Zhang, Zeke Xie, Mao Yang

Trust Region Policy Distillation: 33 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #4 of 14 papers on 2026-07-13. Day-by-day upvote history.

Big goals are hard to achieve all at once; breaking them into small steps is wiser. We present Trust Region Policy Distillation (TOP-D), which transforms the notoriously unstable, high-variance On-Policy Distillation (OPD) into a stable training paradigm by dynamically constructing a proximal teacher. Theoretically, we establish a rigorous framework demonstrating that TOP-D inherently controls gradient variance. By providing a formal global convergence analysis alongside a monotonic improvement bound, we mathematically formalize the reliability and stability of the overall training dynamics. Empirically, TOP-D dramatically enhances training stability, sample efficiency, and final performance on mathematical reasoning tasks. More importantly, TOP-D introduces zero additional computational overhead, positioning itself as a promising alternative to the well-established OPD paradigm.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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