arXiv:2608. 08726v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) uses a privileged teacher to supervise a reasoning model on prefixes sampled from its own rollouts.
arXiv:2609.37915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a student to match a privileged teacher distribution along its own sampled trajectory. Standard OPSD applies...
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.
Offline on-policy distillation gains efficiency by collecting student trajectories and teacher supervision once and reusing them throughout optimization. The same reuse makes imperfect supervision per...
The paper introduces VISTA, a method that enhances on‑policy self‑distillation (OPSD) by adapting the teacher model toward the student’s distribution using outcome‑verified rollouts. VISTA keeps the standard OPSD student update but selectively adjusts the teacher only on the top‑k positions with the largest teacher‑student KL divergence, without adding new sampling or reward objectives. Experiments on AIME24, AIME25, and HMMT25 with Qwen3 models show that VISTA outperforms OPSD across all scales, improving Avg@12 by up to 2.1 points.
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves reasoning by training a problem-only student on its own rollouts using dense token-level supervision from a privileged teacher that also sees a reference so...
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...
arXiv:2609.39687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains mathematical reasoning models using a privileged teacher that sees a reference solution and supervises studen...
The paper introduces a method for offline on‑policy distillation that addresses the problem of imperfect teacher supervision. By training on teacher‑successful problems and measuring changes in token likelihoods on teacher‑failed trajectories, the authors derive a learnability signal that weights the distillation loss. This approach improves performance on mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks while reducing computational cost compared to online distillation.
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. 26057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) grounds token-level supervision in the student's own trajectory, yet suffers from prefix failure: once the student commits to a wrong reasoning direction, all subsequent generation builds on this deviation, producing misdirected continuations that elicit unreliable supervision and waste compute.
The paper introduces SCOUT, a co‑training framework that adapts an off‑policy teacher to better continue from student‑generated prefixes in on‑policy distillation (OPD). By periodically optimizing the teacher’s conditional continuation ability using reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, SCOUT improves the teacher’s performance on student prefixes. Experiments across various teacher‑student setups, model scales, and reasoning domains show that SCOUT consistently enhances the effectiveness of OPD.
arXiv:2607. 04763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study on-policy distillation (OPD) for agentic tasks, where an LLM agent interacts with an environment over multiple turns and a student imitates a teacher over these multi-turn interaction histories.