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Xinliang Xiao

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Preprint Aug 2026

Trust Is Not Enough: Influence Calibration for On-Policy Self-Distillation in Agentic RL

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) gives language agents dense token-level supervision from a privileged self-teacher on the policy's own trajectories. Existing methods allocate this supervision mainly by teacher trust, but trust does not reveal whether emphasizing a token supports the current policy objective. We call this the trust-utility mismatch and introduce Influence Calibration for Self-Distillation (ICSD). For each supervised token, ICSD measures the first-order response of its importance-weighted RL surrogate contribution to a teacher-directed output perturbation. Batch-adaptive calibration converts this non-stationary signal into a bounded allocation weight while preserving the original auxiliary-loss mass within each action turn. These detached weights affect only the distillation loss and require no additional model pass. Across ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-QA, ICSD improves all matched aggregate metrics over trust-only allocation under Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and Group-in-Group Policy Optimization (GiGPO), across two model families spanning 1.5B to 7B. At 7B, it reaches 96.1% ALFWorld success and a WebShop score of 93.1. Frozen-batch analyses show that ICSD reduces teacher-supported mass assigned to objective-opposed tokens from 60.1% to 37.8% and raises cosine compatibility with the RL gradient by 0.192. A companion repository is avail- able at https://github.com/lanqz7766/Influence-Calibration-for-On-Policy-Self-Distillation-in-Agentic-RL.

Qizhen Lan, Xinliang Xiao, Xiangchen Guan et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

Making two action heads agree: coordination mechanisms and a runtime collapse certificate for flow-matching policies

A dual-representation flow-matching policy decodes each predicted motion into joint and end-effector spaces, and the residual between the two kinematically equivalent decodings provides a physically interpretable runtime signal. On multimodal tasks, however, independently sampled branches may choose different valid modes, causing false alarms. We study how to coordinate the two branches and at what cost. Across two robot environments and a non-robotic testbed, the tested mechanisms fall into four classes. An auxiliary latent shared by both branches but absent from the flow-matching construction is erased at the population optimum, a provable dead end confirmed within a prespecified 2% equivalence band. Sharing source noise can coordinate or anti-coordinate: its effect changes sign with the representation map and tracks the alignment of decoder mode basins. Consistency regularization gives intermediate coordination but reduces the valid-pair rate, while training-supported discrete partitions achieve near-ceiling coordination robustly. We further derive a chance-corrected coordination bound based only on each branch's Gini-Simpson diversity, yielding an attainable region and a label-free certificate that separates coordination from collapse when zero mismatch is ambiguous. On LIBERO-Plus, benign multimodality adds 1.57 percentage points of false alarms to the residual, which remains the strongest evaluated failure signal; the preregistered token intervention does not meet its false-alarm criterion or produce a seed-robust detection change. Code, models, and per-run configurations are available at https://github.com/kimo423/dual-head-coordination.

Jinhui Sun, Wei Zhou, Bowen Yang et al. · 0 citations

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