Reward-Aligned Distillation

Yilan Chen, Zian Su, Manish Prajapat, Dingmin Wang, Rein Houthooft +2

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but remains computationally expensive and sample inefficient. On-policy distillation (OPD) provides dense token-level supervision from a stronger teacher, yet standard OPD distills every token regardless of whether the teacher's preference actually improves task reward. Existing token-selection methods rely on proxies such as uncertainty or teacher--student divergence, which need not identify reward-improving supervision. We introduce Reward-Aligned Distillation (RAD), a bilevel framework that weights distillation signals based on their predicted effect on the student's post-update reward. RAD differentiates through a temporary optimizer step to score each token's supervision, then updates the token weights by projected ascent from the initial token weights. The resulting weights can strengthen, suppress, or reverse individual distillation-gradient contributions. At a matched training-response budget, RAD improves mean accuracy on six competition-math benchmarks over the strongest baselines by 6.5 percentage points for Qwen3-1.7B (non-thinking) and 2.5 points for…