arXiv:2602. 02244v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The standard post-training recipe for large reasoning models, supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning (SFT-then-RL), may limit the benefits of the RL stage: while SFT imitates expert demonstrations, it often causes overconfidence and reduces generation diversity, leaving RL with a narrowed solution space to explore.
By Hao Wang, Hao Gu, Hongming Piao, Kaixiong Gong, Yuxiao Ye, Xiangyu Yue, Sirui Han, Yike Guo, Dapeng Wu
arXiv:2605.10194v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) uses a model as its own teacher under privileged context, providing token-level supervision on the model's own r...
By Jiaxuan Wang, Xuan Ouyang, Zhiyu Chen, Yulan Hu, Lan-Zhe Guo
arXiv:2605. 12400v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study on-policy self-distillation (OPSD), where a language model improves its reasoning ability by distilling privileged teacher distributions along its own on-policy trajectories.
By Yuxiao Yang, Xiaoyun Wang, Weitong Zhang
arXiv:2602. 17686v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly improved LLMs' mathematical problem-solving capabilities, but distilling such capabilities into smaller models remains challenging due to the capacity mismatch between verbose teachers and compact students.
By Bowen Yu, Sheng Zhang, Binhao Wang, Yi Wen, Jingtong Gao, Bowen Liu, Zimo Zhao, Shanshan Ye, Wanyu Wang, Maolin Wang, Xiangyu Zhao
arXiv:2608. 03673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many critical reasoning tasks, including clinical diagnosis, legal judgment, and industrial fault diagnosis, require step-dependent causal chains in which early errors propagate and correct conclusions can mask invalid reasoning.
By Jian Zhang, Bingyi Wang, Yizhi Liu
arXiv:2602. 22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students.
By Zhaoyang Zhang, Shuli Jiang, Yantao Shen, Yuting Zhang, Dhananjay Ram, Shuo Yang, Zhuowen Tu, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto
CataOPD introduces a new framework for improving large language model reasoning by combining reinforcement learning and on‑policy distillation. The method treats the teacher as a catalyst that expands the student’s reachability, using Self‑Rescue Routing to find correct trajectories through additional on‑policy sampling and Catalytic‑Guided Self‑Resolution to elicit verified student trajectories. Barrier‑Weighted Internalization further focuses updates on decisive tokens, leading to better performance on unseen problems and improved out‑of‑distribution generalization.
By Wenjin Liu, Chenxi Wang, Jiapu Wang, Zhe Cui, Anh Tuan Luu, Haoran Luo
The paper introduces a recursive self-improvement framework for language models that replaces an external teacher with a frozen copy of the student, enabling dynamic co-evolution (DCE) and self-refined concise learning (SRCL). DCE allows the privileged teacher to evolve alongside the student, while SRCL trains on shorter, verified rewrites to reduce verbosity. Experiments show that the combined DCE+SRCL approach outperforms traditional on‑policy self‑distillation across multiple model sizes and math benchmarks, achieving significant accuracy gains and shorter outputs.
By Shangjian Yin, Zehao Zhao, Kavosh Asadi, Rui Liu, Yuchen Lu, Shike Mei, Hang Cui, Luke Simon, Zhouxing Shi, Hamed Firooz
arXiv:2508. 09883v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities in tasks such as algorithmic coding and mathematical problem-solving.
By Xiaojun Wu, Xiaoguang Jiang, Huiyang Li, Jucai Zhai, Dengfeng Liu, Qiaobo Hao, Huang Liu, Zhiguo Yang, Ji Xie, Ninglun Gu, Jin Yang, Kailai Zhang, Yelun Bao, Jun Wang
arXiv:2609.26216v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A correct teacher solution becomes useful supervision when the receiving student can continue its reasoning. We measure this compatibility with prefix...
By Ruitong Li, Binjie Guo, Aisheng Mo, Guowei Su, Han Wang, Jie Li, Ru Zhang
Long-horizon reasoning in recent LLMs demands that the model switch between distinct skills inside a reasoning chain, such as first doing a math derivation, then using the result to plan a schedule. We call such problems cross-skill long-horizon tasks: multi-step tasks whose steps require different reasoning skills and depend on earlier outputs.
arXiv:2606. 10385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has demonstrated strong empirical gains in enhancing complex reasoning in LLMs by aligning a student model with a teacher's predictive distribution over the student's own trajectories.
By Wenhao Zhang