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:2608.29030v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In-context watermarking (ICW) prepends an instruction to a query asking the model to embed a statistically detectable signal in its response. It thus e...
By Yepeng Liu, Tianyi Chen, Xuandong Zhao, Dawn Song, Yuheng Bu
arXiv:2609.23449v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Memory systems are becoming a core component of LLM agents, but constructing and maintaining memory remains expensive because it relies on repeated c...
By Pirzada Suhail, Menglin Xia, Xuchao Zhang, Mayukh Das, Chetan Bansal, Saravan Rajmohan
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
The paper introduces Privileged Self-Practice (PSP), a method that retains privileged information (PI) in the prompt rather than the loss during on‑policy self‑distillation for multi‑turn agents. PSP injects short per‑task instructions from an analyzer model when rollouts fail, sampling again with the instruction in context and training with the unchanged GRPO objective. Experiments on AppWorld and SWE‑bench Verified show PSP consistently outperforms plain GRPO, boosting task‑goal completion by up to 65% and resolved rate by up to 61% across three student models.
By Xingyu Su, Abhishek Kumar, Qing Ping, Youzhi Luo, Jonathan Buck, Zach Zhang, Subramanian Chidambaram, Vinayak Arannil
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...
By Md. Ismail Hossain, Humaira Kousar, Isidora Chara Tourni
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
The paper introduces Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization (ZPPO), a method that keeps a teacher model inside prompts rather than in the policy gradient to improve knowledge distillation for small students. ZPPO creates two types of reformulated prompts—Binary Candidate-included Questions (BCQ) and Negative Candidate-included Questions (NCQ)—to expose students to correct and incorrect responses, and uses a replay buffer to focus training on hard questions until the student’s accuracy improves. Experiments on the Qwen3.5 family with a 27B teacher across 31 benchmarks show that ZPPO outperforms both off‑policy and on‑policy distillation methods, especially at the smallest student scales.
By Byung-Kwan Lee, Ximing Lu, Shizhe Diao, Minki Kang, Saurav Muralidharan, Karan Sapra, Andrew Tao, Pavlo Molchanov, Yejin Choi, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Ryo Hachiuma
The paper examines on‑policy self‑distillation (OPSD) for multi‑turn agents, showing that using privileged information (PI) in the loss can make agents appear confident yet underperform plain RL, sometimes worse than the untrained base model. To address this, the authors propose Privileged Self‑Practice (PSP), which keeps PI in the prompt and uses it only during sampling, not in the loss. PSP consistently outperforms plain GRPO across AppWorld and SWE‑bench Verified, improving task‑goal completion by up to 65% and resolved rate by up to 61%.
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