arXiv Machine Learning

On-Policy Self-Distillation with Sampled Demonstrations Reduces Output Diversity

arXiv:2606. 26091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation achieves strong pass@1 accuracy by using a single model as both teacher and student, with the teacher conditioned on a correct demonstration to provide dense token-level feedback.

arXiv AI
Aug 11

SR-OPSD: Self-Referenced On-Policy Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608. 09745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) converts feedback into dense token-level supervision on trajectories generated by the policy to be optimized, providing a useful complement to reinforcement learning with sparse outcome rewards.

By Zhuo Sun, Entong Li, Yanlong Zhao, Xiaoyuan Cheng, Wenxuan Yuan, Kaiyu Li, Che Liu, Huihang Liu, Harrison Bo Hua Zhu, Li Zeng
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
arXiv AI
Sep 7

RISE: Recursive Improvement via Self-Extrapolating Policy Distillation

RISE (Recursive Improvement via Self-Extrapolating Policy Distillation) is a new method that builds a synthetic teacher from a language model’s own RLVR training trajectory. By extrapolating the displacement between the current checkpoint and a trailing anchor in parameter or logit space, RISE transforms sparse outcome-based updates into dense token-level targets without external models or privileged conditioning. The approach recursively refines the student model, combining RLVR and on‑policy distillation, and demonstrates superior performance across mathematical reasoning, STEM, code generation, and multi‑turn agentic tasks.

By Yang Li, Semih Yavuz, Shafiq Joty
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

Activation-Conditioned Self-Distillation

arXiv:2609.38342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation uses a model as its own teacher to provide dense supervision for reasoning, often through reference-solution conditioning....

By Zhexi Lu, Subhajit Chaudhury, Tejaswini Pedapati, Keerthiram Murugesan, Lei Yu
arXiv AI
6d ago

TISD: On-Policy Self-Distillation with Trajectory Intervention

The paper introduces TISD, a trajectory-intervention self-distillation method that forces a teacher-selected branch action and then lets the student generate the suffix, distilling the full trajectory under a privileged-context-conditioned teacher. This approach addresses a data-collection bottleneck in on‑policy self‑distillation by exposing successor contexts that the student would otherwise miss. Experiments on coding and science domains show modest but consistent improvements in average performance metrics compared to baseline methods.

By Taeckyung Lee, Rinat Amankos, Jeonghye Kim, Hyungjun Yoon, Woogyeol Jin, Sung-Ju Lee
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Preference-Based Self-Distillation: Beyond KL Matching via Reward Regularization

The paper introduces Preference‑Based Self‑Distillation (PBSD), a new on‑policy self‑distillation method that replaces traditional KL matching with a reward‑regularized objective. PBSD derives a reward‑reweighted teacher distribution, optimizing preference gaps between teacher and student samples while keeping on‑policy sampling. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and tool‑use tasks show PBSD achieves stronger average performance, improved training stability, and maintains token efficiency compared to prior self‑distillation baselines.

By Xin Yu, Liuchen Liao, Yiwen Zhang, Yingchen Yu, Lingzhou Xue, Qinzhen Guo