arXiv AI

Rethinking Reward Supervision: Rubric-Conditioned Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606. 19327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training of reasoning language models is commonly driven by supervised distillation and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 17

Rethinking Reward Supervision: Rubric-Conditioned Self-Distillation

Post-training of reasoning language models is commonly driven by supervised distillation and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. Distillation often relies on chain-of-thought annotations that are expensive to obtain and may themselves be noisy, incomplete, or partially incorrect; even when the final solution is correct, an imperfect rationale can interfere with learning.

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 Machine Learning
Aug 12

Reinforcement Learning-based Semi-supervised Knowledge Distillation with LLM-as-a-Judge

arXiv:2604. 02621v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) substantially improves the reasoning capabilities of language models, but most existing RL fine-tuning approaches rely entirely on ground-truth verifiable rewards and thus labeled datasets with verifiable answers.

By Yiyang Shen, Lifu Tu, Weiran Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 5

Rubrics as Privileged Information for Open-Ended Generation

arXiv:2608. 02948v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD), where a single model acts as both student and teacher with different contexts, has shown promise in verifiable domains like math, where hard privileged information (PI) in the form of ground-truth answers structurally constrains valid continuations.

By Deepika Bablani, Ajay Gupta, Wanming Chen
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Correct Is Not Enough: Training Reasoning Planners with Executor-Grounded Rewards

arXiv:2605. 03862v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a common way to improve explicit reasoning in large language models, but final-answer correctness alone does not reveal whether the reasoning trace is faithful, reliable, or useful to the model that consumes it.

By Tianyang Han, Hengyu Shi, Junjie Hu, Xu Yang, Zhiling Wang, Junhao Su
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 15

Entropy-Preserving Supervised Fine-Tuning via Adaptive Self-Distillation for Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2602. 02244v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The standard post-training recipe for large reasoning models, supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning (SFT-then-RL), may limit the benefits of the RL stage: while SFT imitates expert demonstrations, it often causes overconfidence and reduces generation diversity, leaving RL with a narrowed solution space to explore.

By Hao Wang, Hao Gu, Hongming Piao, Kaixiong Gong, Yuxiao Ye, Xiangyu Yue, Sirui Han, Yike Guo, Dapeng Wu
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 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