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MemOPD: On-Policy Distillation through Memory State Alignment for Long-Horizon Agents

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TL;DR - MemOPD is an on-policy distillation method for long-horizon LLM agents that use compact memory, fixing a subtle mismatch where the teacher scores student actions under a rewritten context the student never actually saw. It matters because valid dense teacher supervision substantially outperforms sparse-reward PPO for learning what an agent should retain in memory.

  • Core problem: memory compression rewrites context between invocations, so flattening rollouts into a persistent history makes actions "on-policy by provenance, but not by state," invalidating teacher scoring.
  • Method: record each invocation's inputs and sampled outputs, restore original token positions and causal visibility, and pack reconstructed invocations for efficient teacher scoring; teacher gives full-vocabulary supervision at sampled action positions while PPO retains the final task objective.
  • Results: +7.0% F1 over persistent-history teacher scoring in a matched control; MemOPD-3B improves F1 over PPO by up to 416.2%; packing gives up to 1.63x actor-computation speedup during training.
  • Code released at github.com/TPssp/MemOPD.

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MemOPD: On-Policy Distillation through Memory State Alignment for Long-Horizon Agents

arXiv cs.AI Zhiyuan Liu, Tinghong Ye, Chenghao Liu, Yizhuo Li, Songfang Huang 2026-08-07 arXiv:2608.07068
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-03 14:28:53.288082 UTC

TL;DR - MemOPD is an on-policy distillation method for long-horizon LLM agents that use compact memory, fixing a subtle mismatch where the teacher scores student actions under a rewritten context the student never actually saw. It matters because valid dense teacher supervision substantially outperforms sparse-reward PPO for learning what an agent should retain in memory.

  • Core problem: memory compression rewrites context between invocations, so flattening rollouts into a persistent history makes actions "on-policy by provenance, but not by state," invalidating teacher scoring.
  • Method: record each invocation's inputs and sampled outputs, restore original token positions and causal visibility, and pack reconstructed invocations for efficient teacher scoring; teacher gives full-vocabulary supervision at sampled action positions while PPO retains the final task objective.
  • Results: +7.0% F1 over persistent-history teacher scoring in a matched control; MemOPD-3B improves F1 over PPO by up to 416.2%; packing gives up to 1.63x actor-computation speedup during training.
  • Code released at github.com/TPssp/MemOPD.
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