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).
By Yijiang Li, Bingyang Wang, Yijun Liang, Yunjie Tian, Di Fu, Nuno Vasconcelos
arXiv:2607. 09709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training a code generator against a learned judge can optimize proxy features that raise the score without improving the artifact.
By Chenyu Zhou, Qiliang Jiang, Shuning Wu, Xu Zhou
arXiv:2607. 18293v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) teaches large language models new skills through a teacher that shares the student's backbone and supervises its own rollouts.
By Yingzi Ma, Zichen Zhu, Ming Jiang, Chaowei Xiao
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:2607. 05339v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is effective when the current policy already samples useful reasoning trajectories, but it stalls on hard prompts whose correct solution modes lie outside the student's on-policy support.
By Yuanda Xu, Zhengze Zhou, Kayhan Behdin, Jelena Markovic-Voronov, Hejian Sang, Xiaomin Li, Wenhui Zhu, Xinchen Du, Aida Rahmattalabi, Ran He, Sen Na, Zhipeng Wang, Alborz Geramifard
arXiv:2608. 12957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) learns from reward differences within a rollout group, but receives no useful relative signal when every sampled response is incorrect.
By Yubo Zhang, Xinhong Ma, Zezhong Tan, Ziqiang Dong
arXiv:2608. 09826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards yields no group-relative signal when rollout groups are uniformly correct or uniformly wrong, which account for 63.
By Yubo Jiang, Fengying Xie, Zhiguo Jiang, Haopeng Zhang
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.
By Sarthak Harne, Chinmay Karkar, Yash Pandya, Ahmed Awadallah, Akshay Nambi
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is effective when the current policy already samples useful reasoning trajectories, but it stalls on hard prompts whose correct solution modes lie outside the student's on-policy support. We propose TREK (Teacher-Routed Exploration via Forward KL), a simple staged procedure that uses distillation not for imitation but for exploration support expansion.
arXiv:2606. 01080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models often improve on difficult tasks by spending inference-time compute on a reasoning trace before producing the final answer.
By Dhruv Saini, Rohan Pandey
arXiv:2607. 14111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can small language models detect and report on perturbations their own internal activations?
By Ely Hahami, Ishaan Sinha, Lavik Jain