arXiv AI

Adaptive Teacher Exposure for Self-Distillation in LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2605. 11458v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy self-distillation has become a strong recipe for LLM reasoning, where a privileged teacher supervises the student's own rollouts while conditioning on the reference solution.

arXiv AI
Aug 6

Privileged, but Biased: How PI-Conditioned Teachers Break Self-Distillation

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
arXiv AI
Jul 3

Purified OPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation Without Losing How to Think

arXiv:2607. 02234v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving LLM reasoning, where a privileged teacher with access to reference solutions provides token-level supervision on the student's own generated trajectories.

By Zhanming Shen, Jintao Tong, Shaotian Yan, Chen Shen, Hao Chen, Wentao Ye, Xiaomeng Hu, Rui Miao, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao, Gang Chen, Jieping Ye
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 22

H$^2$SD: Hybrid Hindsight Self-Distillation

arXiv:2607. 18955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models on tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation.

By Qiye Cai, Yichuan Ma, Linyang Li, Peiji Li, Yongkang Chen, Qipeng Guo, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Xiaocheng Feng, Bing Qin
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Matching Supervision to the Student's Learning Capacity: A Unified Framework for On-Policy Self-Distillation

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.

By Yongkang Yang, Zhezheng Hao, Hong Zhang, Yi Liu, Xiankun Lin, Wence Ji, Fanjunduo Wei, Jiarui Yu, Qiang Lin, Xiaoyun Liang, Hande Dong
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

RLCSD: Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive On-Policy Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606. 11709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) provides dense, token-level supervision for reasoning models by aligning a model's own distribution with the distribution it produces under privileged context, typically a verified solution.

By Leyi Pan, Shuchang Tao, Yunpeng Zhai, Lingzhe Zhang, Zhaoyang Liu, Bolin Ding, Aiwei Liu, Lijie Wen
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Reward-Gated On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2607. 04037v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation is a powerful way to transfer reasoning ability from a strong teacher to a smaller student: the student samples trajectories from its own policy, and the teacher provides dense token-level supervision on the states the student actually visits.

By Mohammad Sadegh Akhondzadeh, Vijay Lingam, Atula Tejaswi, Chanakya Ekbote, Sujay Sanghavi, Aleksandar Bojchevski
arXiv AI
Jul 3

DemoPSD: Disagreement-Modulated Policy Self-Distillation

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