Sequential Beats Joint: On the Interplay between On-Policy Distillation and RLVR

arXiv:2609.04108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and on-policy distillation (OPD) have emerged as two dominant methods for post-training reasoning LLMs.

Prior work uses OPD's dense token-level supervision to complement the sparse RL reward, fusing the two signals within a single step: either as a \emph{weighted-additive combination} or a \emph{teacher-modulated rescaling} of the RL advantage.

In this paper, we show that a simple two-stage scheme, OPD-then-RL, consistently outperforms pure OPD, pure RLVR, and all such joint baselines across logic and math reasoning benchmarks.

Beyond the empirical results, we further provide a systematic understanding of this through pass@$k$ behavior, learning dynamics, and parameter updates, yielding a consistent explanation: OPD expands the student's coverage of teacher-supported solutions and RL sharpens within that support, while jointly optimizing the two signals causes them to interfere.To provide a practical recipe, we find that the OPD validation score is the key signal for when to switch to RL, and that OPD is a better cold start for RL than SFT.

Together, our results establish OPD-then-RL as a simple yet strong way to combine the two methods, turning two entangled signals into complementary stages.