Beyond Domain-Routed Supervision: Cross-Teacher Guarding for Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation· 超越领域路由监督:多教师在线策略蒸馏的跨教师保护
Multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD) extends on-policy distillation (OPD) by routing domain-specific data to specialized teachers, integrating their capabilities through dense token-level supervision on student-generated trajectories. However, domain routing only distinguishes the supervision sources for different domains; updates from all domains still act on shared parameters. When teachers differ substantially in response style and domain expertise, supervision that is effective in isolation may still lead to persistent gradient conflicts and capability degradation during joint optimization. To address this challenge, we propose Cross-Teacher Guarding for MOPD (Road MOPD), which introduces non-routed teachers as auxiliary cross-domain critics on the same student trajectories and