Improved Policy Extraction via Online Q-Value Distillation
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Deep neural networks are capable of solving complex control tasks in challenging environments, but their learned policies are hard to interpret. Not being able to explain or verify them limits their practical applicability. By contrast, decision trees lend themselves well to explanation and verification, but are not easy to train, especially in an online fashion. In this work we introduce Q-BSP trees and propose an Ordered Sequential Monte Carlo training algorithm that efficiently distills the Q-function from fully trained deep Q-networks into a tree structure. Q-BSP forests are used to generate the partitioning rules that transparently reconstruct an accurate value function. We explain our approach and provide results that convincingly beat earlier online policy distillation methods with respect to their own performance benchmarks.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it