SpikeOPD: Stable On-Policy Distillation for Autoregressive Spiking Language Models

Abstract

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a path to energy-efficient language modeling through sparse encoding and event-driven computation, but training capable spiking language models from scratch remains difficult. A practical alternative is ANN-to-SNN migration through knowledge distillation (KD), where a pretrained artificial neural network (ANN) teacher supervises an SNN student. Existing migration approaches distill on fixed corpus prefixes, whereas autoregressive inference conditions on self-generated prefixes, creating prefix-source mismatch. It manifests as output-policy mismatch with the ANN teacher and internal spiking-dynamics drift between self-generated and matched corpus prefixes. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers a natural way to mitigate both manifestations by continuing teacher supervision on self-generated prefixes. We evaluate a teacher-only full-KL variant, Vanilla OPD, via a controlled stress test and observe it may suffer from delayed rollout-feedback collapse. This result shows that on-policy coverage alone does not ensure stable adaptation. Motivated by these findings, we propose SpikeOPD, a stable on-policy distillation framework for autoregressive SNNs that learns from self-generated prefixes while maintaining rollout stability. It applies full-KL teacher correction to reduce output-policy mismatch, while matched-prefix policy anchoring constrains policy departure from the frozen reference SNN on the same prefixes. Layerwise spike regularization further limits firing-rate deviations during on-policy adaptation. Across three model scales, SpikeOPD improves average accuracy over the corresponding KD SNNs by 0.8, 1.7, and 2.9 points at 0.125B, 0.35B, and 1.3B, respectively, while preserving their sparse-compute profiles.