The paper introduces temporal self‑distillation for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), proposing that a policy can learn from a stronger future checkpoint of itself. Two methods—Near‑Future Policy Optimization (NPO) and Near‑Future Policy Distillation (NPD)—use verified future‑self trajectories and token‑level transfer, respectively, while AutoNPO adaptively selects the optimal future checkpoint. Experiments on eight image‑text benchmarks show that near‑future teachers yield higher performance than far‑future ones, indicating that the balance between new capability and learner compatibility is key.
arXiv:2609.37132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves large language models by letting a self-teacher with privileged information provide dense token-level super...
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: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.
arXiv:2608. 13040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enabling agents to learn from experience and internalize it into their policy has become a central problem in self-evolving AI.
Enabling agents to learn from experience and internalize it into their policy has become a central problem in self-evolving AI. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) offers an effective pathway by using a privileged self-teacher to provide dense supervision on the student's own trajectories; however, existing methods still rely heavily on designer-specified privileged artifacts (e.
arXiv:2607. 01763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual post-training enables foundation models to acquire new knowledge while preserving existing capabilities.
Continual post-training enables foundation models to acquire new knowledge while preserving existing capabilities. Recent work suggests that on-policy learning can mitigate forgetting, with on-policy self-distillation emerging as a particularly attractive approach.
SIPO (Self‑Instructing Policy Optimization) unifies reinforcement learning with on‑policy self‑distillation by using a contrastive self‑teacher to generate token‑level credit signals. The method samples multiple rollouts per prompt, pairs each with a reference answer and its mistakes, and uses the difference in teacher log‑probabilities to provide dense feedback while still respecting the overall task reward. Experiments on reasoning and code‑generation benchmarks show that SIPO outperforms both RLVR and OPSD baselines without requiring an external teacher or extra generation steps.
arXiv:2605.10194v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) uses a model as its own teacher under privileged context, providing token-level supervision on the model's own r...
arXiv:2606. 10385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has demonstrated strong empirical gains in enhancing complex reasoning in LLMs by aligning a student model with a teacher's predictive distribution over the student's own trajectories.
arXiv:2606. 30345v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enabling large language models to achieve stable self-improvement without external expert supervision remains a central challenge in complex reasoning tasks.
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.