The paper investigates how privileged information—such as a teacher’s full solution or reasoning trace—affects on‑policy self‑distillation (OPSD) in language models. Using the AMPLE‑Math benchmark, the authors compare distillation with and without extra teacher views, finding that reference‑free distillation explains most gains for Qwen3‑1.7B, while additional references provide modest benefits, especially for polished solutions. The study also shows that the impact of privileged data depends on the student’s training regime and that altering token‑level supervision can leave student behavior largely unchanged.
By XiuYu Zhang, Wei Chow, Junfeng Fang, Zhenkai Liang, Tat-Seng Chua
arXiv:2607. 28639v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that knowledge distillation in small instruction-tuned language models has asymmetric effects on bias.
By Plawan Kumar Rath
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
The paper introduces Group‑Calibrated On‑Policy Distillation (GC‑OPD), a method that aligns token‑level teacher guidance with trajectory‑level verifier rewards for long‑context reasoning tasks. GC‑OPD normalizes rewards within rollout groups, uses the signed teacher‑verifier disagreement as a residual, and distributes this residual across tokens via Relative‑Advantage‑Based Credit Assignment (RACA). Experiments on five long‑context benchmarks show that GC‑OPD improves Qwen3‑4B and Qwen3‑8B checkpoints from 29.08/35.12 to 40.47/44.65, outperforming vanilla OPD and demonstrating the effectiveness of group‑relative residual calibration.
By Zhu Zhang, Jixun Wang, Xiaoang Xu, Xiaorong Wang, Zihan Zhou, Zhiyuan Wang, Shuo Wang, Chaojun Xiao, Yuezhi Zhou
arXiv:2605. 15532v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distillation enables compact Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to obtain strong reasoning capabilities, yet the prompts driving this process are typically chosen via simple heuristics or aggregated from off-the-shelf datasets.
By Jaehun Jung, Hyunwoo Kim, Brandon Cui, Ximing Lu, David Acuna, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Yejin Choi
The paper investigates whether distilling reasoning traces from large teacher models is worth the extra compute compared to standard instruction fine‑tuning (IFT). By generating paired IFT and reasoning outputs from the same teacher and training student models at five scales, the authors find that, at matched FLOPs, IFT generally lies on or near the Pareto frontier across most configurations. Reasoning traces only reach the frontier on open‑ended tasks for models 7B and larger, and a curriculum mixing 25–50% reasoning data with IFT can capture most of the accuracy benefit at a lower compute cost.
By Nicolas Boizard, Hippolyte Gisserot-Boukhlef, Kevin El Haddad, C\'eline Hudelot, Pierre Colombo
arXiv:2603. 26556v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Converting a pretrained Transformer into a more efficient hybrid model through distillation offers a promising approach to reducing inference costs.
By Juan Gabriel Kostelec, Qinghai Guo
arXiv:2607. 26246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns a student with the teacher's token-level distribution on the student's own rollouts, is an effective paradigm for transferring capabilities across LLMs.
By Fangxu Yu, Zinan Lin, Xiaodong Liu, Weijia Xu, Michael Xu, Tianyi Zhou, Jianfeng Gao
The paper introduces Group-Calibrated On-Policy Distillation (GC‑OPD), a method that aligns token‑level teacher guidance with task‑level verifier rewards for long‑context reasoning. GC‑OPD normalizes verifier and OPD scores within rollout groups, uses their difference as a signed disagreement residual, and redistributes this residual across tokens via Relative‑Advantage‑Based Credit Assignment (RACA). Experiments on five long‑context benchmarks show that GC‑OPD improves Qwen3‑4B and Qwen3‑8B checkpoints from 29.08/35.12 to 40.47/44.65, outperforming vanilla OPD and demonstrating the effectiveness of group‑relative residual calibration.
arXiv:2606. 31048v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates knowledge distillation from a large reasoning model (DeepSeek-R1) to a compact student model (Qwen2.
By Gaurab Baral, Aaditya Khanal, Yangyang Tao, Junxiu Zhou
arXiv:2607. 21692v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse attention prunes a long context to the blocks a model needs, and the usual selector is distilled from a dense teacher's attention.
By Jim Allchin
arXiv:2609.37326v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy distillation, where a student learns from a stronger teacher's feedback on its own outputs, is a common way to pass reasoning to smaller mode...
By Hongyang Li, Yiming Zhu, Xiao Li, Caesar Wu, Said Mammar, Pascal Bouvry