arXiv AI

Privileged, but Biased: How PI-Conditioned Teachers Break Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608. 04794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation (SD) has emerged as a compute-efficient alternative to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards: a self-teacher, conditioned on privileged information (PI) about the answer such as a reference solution, supplies dense per-token supervision to a student that never sees it.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 22

H$^2$SD: Hybrid Hindsight Self-Distillation

arXiv:2607. 18955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models on tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation.

By Qiye Cai, Yichuan Ma, Linyang Li, Peiji Li, Yongkang Chen, Qipeng Guo, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Xiaocheng Feng, Bing Qin
arXiv AI
Jul 3

DemoPSD: Disagreement-Modulated Policy Self-Distillation

arXiv:2607. 02502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has emerged as a practical method for training large language models (LLMs) to reason, where a single model acts as both the teacher and the student with different levels of information access.

By Yunhe Li, Hao Shi, Wenhao Liu, Mengzhe Ruan, Hanxu Hou, Zhongxiang Dai, Shuang Qiu, Linqi Song
arXiv Computation and Language
5d ago

Recursive Self-Improvement via On-Policy Distillation for Reasoning

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 Machine Learning
Aug 27

One Symptom, Three Levers: A Critical Review of On-Policy Self-Distillation

The paper reviews On‑Policy Self‑Distillation (OPSD), a method where a language model learns from its own generations using privileged information such as reference solutions or plans, eliminating the need for a larger teacher model. It identifies a key failure mode—collapse, where the model’s reasoning paths narrow progressively—and analyzes it through three levers: signal application, privileged information, and teacher dynamics. The review focuses on mathematical reasoning, offering a unified vocabulary and distinguishing settled facts from ongoing debates.

By Justin Robert, Raheel Qader
arXiv AI
Aug 11

SR-OPSD: Self-Referenced On-Policy Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608. 09745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) converts feedback into dense token-level supervision on trajectories generated by the policy to be optimized, providing a useful complement to reinforcement learning with sparse outcome rewards.

By Zhuo Sun, Entong Li, Yanlong Zhao, Xiaoyuan Cheng, Wenxuan Yuan, Kaiyu Li, Che Liu, Huihang Liu, Harrison Bo Hua Zhu, Li Zeng
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Activation-Conditioned Self-Distillation

arXiv:2609.38342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation uses a model as its own teacher to provide dense supervision for reasoning, often through reference-solution conditioning....

By Zhexi Lu, Subhajit Chaudhury, Tejaswini Pedapati, Keerthiram Murugesan, Lei Yu
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Matching Supervision to the Student's Learning Capacity: A Unified Framework for On-Policy Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608. 08176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves the reasoning abilities of LLMs by internalizing privileged context into model parameters through self-distillation.

By Yongkang Yang, Zhezheng Hao, Hong Zhang, Yi Liu, Xiankun Lin, Wence Ji, Fanjunduo Wei, Jiarui Yu, Qiang Lin, Xiaoyun Liang, Hande Dong
arXiv AI
3d ago

SIPO: Unifying Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Self-Distillation

SIPO (Self‑Instructing Policy Optimization) unifies reinforcement learning with on‑policy self‑distillation by using a contrastive self‑teacher to generate token‑level credit signals. The method samples multiple rollouts per prompt, pairs each with a reference answer and its mistakes, and uses the difference in teacher log‑probabilities to provide dense feedback while still respecting the overall task reward. Experiments on reasoning and code‑generation benchmarks show that SIPO outperforms both RLVR and OPSD baselines without requiring an external teacher or extra generation steps.

By Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Yueqi Wang, Yaokun Liu, Fengran Mo, Jinghan Zhang, Mung Yao Jia, Gyuseok Lee, Yang Zhang, Na Wei, Dong Wang