On-Policy Self-Distillation without Any Supervision
arXiv:2608. 06296v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy (Self-)Distillation (OPD / OPSD) has shown strong potential for post-training large language models (LLMs).
On-policy (Self-)Distillation (OPD / OPSD) has shown strong potential for post-training large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods still rely heavily on external supervision, including ground-truth signals, environmental feedback, or guidance from larger models, and therefore fall short of genuine "self"-distillation.
arXiv:2608. 06296v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy (Self-)Distillation (OPD / OPSD) has shown strong potential for post-training large language models (LLMs).
arXiv:2609.37915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a student to match a privileged teacher distribution along its own sampled trajectory. Standard OPSD applies...
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.
arXiv:2609.37132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves large language models by letting a self-teacher with privileged information provide dense token-level super...
arXiv:2606. 08432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a central post-training tool for large language models (LLMs), providing dense per-token teacher supervision along the student's own rollouts.
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.
arXiv:2607. 17558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) offers a promising approach for training large language models without relying on a separate teacher model.
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....
arXiv:2609.38142v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A small trainable advisor can steer a frozen language-model executor using natural-language advice. In addition to learning from task rewards, the advi...
RISE (Recursive Improvement via Self-Extrapolating Policy Distillation) is a new method that builds a synthetic teacher from a language model’s own RLVR training trajectory. By extrapolating the displacement between the current checkpoint and a trailing anchor in parameter or logit space, RISE transforms sparse outcome-based updates into dense token-level targets without external models or privileged conditioning. The approach recursively refines the student model, combining RLVR and on‑policy distillation, and demonstrates superior performance across mathematical reasoning, STEM, code generation, and multi‑turn agentic tasks.
The paper investigates on‑policy self‑distillation (OPSD) as a method to enhance reasoning in language models, focusing on mathematical reasoning across models from 0.6B to 8B parameters. Through controlled experiments and token‑level analysis, the authors find that OPSD’s effectiveness depends on alignment between the teacher’s reasoning mode and the full teacher prefix, rather than on privileged semantics alone. They observe that OPSD only improves reasoning in limited compatibility regimes, while often causing length growth, degradation, or behavioral collapse, and that the teacher’s signal is unstable and not predictive of downstream performance.
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...