· 18 min read
Waypoint-OPD: What One Discarded Checkpoint Knows That the Endpoints Don't
Waypoint-OPD (Alibaba Cloud) keeps one intermediate checkpoint from the teacher's RL run and turns the agreement between its early and late policy shifts into a per-prefix gate. One frozen scoring pass, zero new parameters: Qwen3-8B goes from 53.96 to 56.14 on seven math benchmarks, and shuffling the gates (51.20) lands below no gate at all (53.50).