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: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:2605.10889v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: On-policy distillation offers dense, per-token supervision for training reasoning models; however, it remains unclear under which conditions...
By Mohammadreza Armandpour, Fatih Ilhan, David Harrison, Ajay Jaiswal, Duc N. M Hoang, Fartash Faghri, Yizhe Zhang, Minsik Cho, Mehrdad Farajtabar
arXiv:2608. 12957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) learns from reward differences within a rollout group, but receives no useful relative signal when every sampled response is incorrect.
By Yubo Zhang, Xinhong Ma, Zezhong Tan, Ziqiang Dong
arXiv:2609.37041v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Self-Distillation Fine-Tuning (SDFT) enables a language model to act as its own teacher: by conditioning on a demonstration, the model produces an im...
By Su Ee Tan, Xiaotong Ji, Rasul Tutunov, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Matthieu Zimmer
arXiv:2609.24646v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation fine-tuning (SDFT) learns new skills from demonstrations while reducing forgetting, but it always distils toward the full d...
By Ahmed Khaled Khamis, Xiaotong Ji, Hassan Jaber, Rasul Tutunov, Matthieu Zimmer, Jun Wang, Haitham Bou-Ammar
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: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.
By Zihao Han, Tiangang Zhang, Huaibin Wang, Yilun Sun
arXiv:2604. 00626v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As Large Language Models continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become an important engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains a common technique for this transfer.
By Mingyang Song, Mao Zheng
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
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
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