arXiv Machine Learning

Teacher-Free Self-Training Amplifies but Does Not Compound: A Pass@$K$ Crossover on a Free-Verifier Domain

arXiv:2606. 07856v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a language model trains on its own verified outputs, does it acquire capability beyond its base, or merely get better at expressing capability the base already had?

arXiv AI
Aug 25

Improving Few-Step Language Flows with Untied Self-Conditioning

The paper introduces Untied Self-Conditioning, a sampler that corrects a train–inference mismatch in flow‑matching language models. By dampening redundant directions in the self‑conditioning input and approximating a step‑average prediction from history, the method improves generation quality without retraining. On LangFlow and ELF‑B datasets, it dramatically lowers perplexity and is preferred in the majority of pairwise comparisons.

By Bocheng Li, Linli Xu
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 24

When does fusing hand-crafted knowledge with learned representations pay? A cost-normalized benchmark of stacking, substitution, and interference

arXiv:2608.21098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fusing prior knowledge with data-driven learning is attractive where data is scarce, yet no controlled account says when it helps, is redundant, or har...

By Ahmad AlMughrabi, Albert Clop, Benjamin Busam, Ricardo Marques, Petia Radeva
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