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A Stronger Teacher Within: Strengthening MoE Models via On-Policy Bidirectional Distillation

Researchers propose MoEvolve, a bidirectional on-policy distillation framework that raises Mixture-of-Experts LLM performance by up to 22.2 domain-average points over the initial models and beats same-budget RLVR baselines by up to 6.5 points, according to the arXiv paper 2610.23185v1. MoEvolve first restores an activation-expanded high-k model and strengthens it using its additional active capacity, then reverses distillation to transfer the gains back into the original low-k configuration while keeping its inference-time activation budget. The authors report the final low-k models often surpass their activation-expanded teachers across diverse MoE models and benchmarks.

by read1 min views1 publishedOct 19, 2026

arXiv:2610.23185v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs, but its outcome-level rewards provide only sparse supervision. On-Policy Distillation offers dense token-level feedback, yet requires a stronger compatible teacher, while on-policy self-distillation relies on hand-designed privileged information. We observe that the MoE architecture itself offers a way to resolve this dilemma, as increasing the activation budget per token exposes latent expert capacity and yields a potentially stronger teacher within the model. However, naive expansion degrades performance because newly co-activated experts are not optimized to work together. We therefore propose MoEvolve, a bidirectional distillation framework following a recovery-then-improvement strategy: we first restore the activation-expanded high-$k$ model and further strengthen it by exploiting its additional active capacity, then reverse the direction of distillation to transfer the enhanced capabilities back into the original low-$k$ configuration, retaining its inference-time activation budget. Across diverse MoE models and benchmarks, MoEvolve improves the initial models by up to $22.2$ domain-average points and outperforms same-budget RLVR baselines by up to $6.5$ points. Notably, the final low-$k$ models often surpass their activation-expanded teachers.

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