arXiv:2607. 08255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models increasingly serve as teachers generating training data for smaller students.
arXiv:2605.28791v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (SD) improves LLM reasoning by using teacher-side privileged information (PI) to turn sparse verifier outcomes in...
arXiv:2609.36546v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its self-generated trajectories with dense token-level teacher feedback. However, naive OPD ma...
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:2609.17474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) distillation aims to transfer the capabilities of a powerful teacher to a smaller student. Direct imitation, however, can...
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.
arXiv:2609.01591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI tutors are most useful when they adapt to each student's strengths, weaknesses, and preferred guidance, but evidence about which guidance works for...
The paper introduces VISTA, a method that enhances on‑policy self‑distillation (OPSD) by adapting the teacher model toward the student’s distribution using outcome‑verified rollouts. VISTA keeps the standard OPSD student update but selectively adjusts the teacher only on the top‑k positions with the largest teacher‑student KL divergence, without adding new sampling or reward objectives. Experiments on AIME24, AIME25, and HMMT25 with Qwen3 models show that VISTA outperforms OPSD across all scales, improving Avg@12 by up to 2.1 points.
arXiv:2609.27717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human-written agent skills encode rich workflows for real-world problem solving, but are typically used as external inference-time instructions rather...
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.
The paper introduces Multi-Teacher Self-Distillation Policy Optimization (MT‑SDPO), an on‑policy distillation method that combines multiple frozen teachers into a single student model. MT‑SDPO uses self‑anchors, answer‑verified eligibility, and privileged distillation to select reliable teachers per sample rather than per domain. Experiments on five students from three model families show that MT‑SDPO improves the weakest domain of Qwen3‑8B by 14.79 points and reduces its domain gap by 74.7%, achieving a more balanced performance than matching a single teacher to each domain.
arXiv:2608. 03206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) power educational applications from tutoring to essay scoring, but each is a point solution to a single task, and only recently have these point solutions been integrated into agents operating over a learning management system (LMS).
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves reasoning by training a problem-only student on its own rollouts using dense token-level supervision from a privileged teacher that also sees a reference so...