Stopping and restarting strategy speeds up multi-turn agentic on-policy distillation

A new arXiv paper addresses the high cost of on-policy distillation, which relies on expensive autoregressive rollouts by the student model and scales poorly when tasks span multiple turns. The authors propose deciding when to halt a rollout and where to resume it, aiming to cut the compute spent on generating student trajectories. The method targets more efficient transfer of capabilities from large teacher models to smaller students in agentic settings.