VASPO introduces a new integration of self-distillation and PPO by leveraging privileged value estimation to guide language model training. The method uses a self-teacher and a critic that both evaluate the same privileged information on student-generated prefixes, allowing the critic to compute token-level PPO advantages from predicted continuation returns while the teacher modulates positive advantages via bounded probability ratios. Experiments on six mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that VASPO improves mean accuracy over standard PPO by 2.59 and 1.81 percentage points on Qwen3-4B and OLMo3-7B, respectively, and achieves the highest mean accuracy among evaluated methods on Knights and Knaves.
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...
Activation-Conditioned Self-Distillation (ACSD) is a new on‑policy self‑distillation method that uses a frozen copy of the base model to extract a steering vector by contrasting activations from self‑generated trajectories that reach verified correct answers with all other trajectories. The student learns from next‑token distributions on its own prefixes, without needing reference text or teacher parameter updates, and is used alone at inference. Across five models, ACSD achieves the highest mean accuracy on four mathematical benchmarks, with notable gains on DeepSeek‑R1‑0528‑Qwen3‑8B and LiveCodeBench v6 compared to the OPSD baseline.
arXiv:2610.18613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-distillation is an emerging approach that trains a model to imitate its own predictions when conditioned on privileged information, such as corr...
The paper introduces On-Policy Attention Self-Distillation (OPASD), a method that augments token-level supervision with solution-conditioned attention distillation for reasoning models. OPASD projects a privileged teacher’s attention onto student-visible positions, renormalizes the distribution, and aligns it with the student. Experiments on three model sizes and four math benchmarks show that OPASD improves accuracy by 4.98–8.40 percentage points, reduces generated tokens by 73.9%, cuts compute by 72.6%, and trains 1.53× faster compared to token-only distillation.
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.
Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards assigns a single scalar to each rollout, leaving token-level credit assignment underspecified in long reasoning traces. On-policy self-distillation addresses this by letting the same model act as a teacher conditioned on privileged information, producing a dense per-token signal.
arXiv:2606. 15576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards assigns a single scalar to each rollout, leaving token-level credit assignment underspecified in long reasoning traces.
arXiv:2610.14001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) uses a self-teacher conditioned on privileged information to turn the sparse outcome signal of reinforcement learn...
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.
arXiv:2606. 00172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), especially Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has been widely used to improve reasoning in large language models.
arXiv:2606. 03620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-distilled policy optimization (SDPO) has become a popular paradigm for LLM post-training, where a model learns from its own predictions conditioned on privileged information.
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.