When Does Online Imitation Learning Help in LLM Post-Training? The Role of (Non-)Realizability Beyond Horizon

arXiv:2606.30445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online imitation learning (IL), particularly on-policy distillation, has emerged as a strong LLM post-training approach, often outperforming offline supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Yet a principled understanding of when and why online interaction helps remains unclear. In this work, we challenge the view that error accumulation is the main source of online IL's advantage, and instead show that the benefits of online interaction depend critically on whether the setting is realizable, i.e., whether the student policy class can represent the expert po

Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.

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