ReOrder-OPD:Reliability-Aware Prompt Ordering for On-Policy Distillation
This work addresses the unreliability of teacher supervision signals in on-policy distillation by introducing, for the first time, a prompt-level teacher consistency reliability metric \( R \), and empirically validates its positive correlation with distillation performance. To efficiently estimate \( R \) without extensive teacher inference, the authors propose ROUGE-5 F1 as a proxy metric, enabling prompts to be ranked in descending order of reliability and integrated into a reliability-aware prompt scheduling mechanism. The approach combines independently sampled student trajectories with teacher trajectories filtered by a verifier, achieving consistent and significant improvements over existing baselines across mathematical and code generation tasks on Qwen3 and Gemma4 models, and demonstrating robust gains in all six configurations of FiRe-OPD and ExOPD.