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:2608. 09555v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: External natural-language skills provide large language model (LLM) agents with reusable and editable guidance for solving complex tasks.
By Tianjun Pan, Yuan Li, Hongda Wang, Linbo Jin, Mengfei Song, Lei Gao, Qiming Shi, Shaokang Fu, Jiarong Zhao, Chengyu Wang, Chengfu Huo
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.
By Chuanyu Qin, Chenxu Yang, Qingyi Si, Naibin Gu, Dingyu Yao, Zheng Lin, Peng Fu, Nan Duan, Jiaqi Wang
arXiv:2605.08693v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Skills provide an effective mechanism for improving LLM agents on complex tasks, yet in existing agent frameworks, their creation, refinement, and...
By Min Yang, Jinghua Piao, Xu Xia, Xiaochong Lan, Jiaju Chen, Yongshun Gong, Yong Li
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
The paper examines on‑policy self‑distillation (OPSD) for multi‑turn agents, showing that using privileged information (PI) in the loss can make agents appear confident yet underperform plain RL, sometimes worse than the untrained base model. To address this, the authors propose Privileged Self‑Practice (PSP), which keeps PI in the prompt and uses it only during sampling, not in the loss. PSP consistently outperforms plain GRPO across AppWorld and SWE‑bench Verified, improving task‑goal completion by up to 65% and resolved rate by up to 61%.
arXiv:2609.39306v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Iterative self-distillation enables LLM agents to learn from successive deployments, offering a path toward recursive self-improvement (RSI). Yet our...
By Shengjie Jin, Hengbo Xu, Zelong Sun, YuJie Guo, Zhiwu Lu
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...
By Zheng Zhang, Xinyue Tan, Lufei Li, Xinyi Zhang, Yexin Li, Kan Ren
The paper introduces Privileged Self-Practice (PSP), a method that retains privileged information (PI) in the prompt rather than the loss during on‑policy self‑distillation for multi‑turn agents. PSP injects short per‑task instructions from an analyzer model when rollouts fail, sampling again with the instruction in context and training with the unchanged GRPO objective. Experiments on AppWorld and SWE‑bench Verified show PSP consistently outperforms plain GRPO, boosting task‑goal completion by up to 65% and resolved rate by up to 61% across three student models.
By Xingyu Su, Abhishek Kumar, Qing Ping, Youzhi Luo, Jonathan Buck, Zach Zhang, Subramanian Chidambaram, Vinayak Arannil
Online training enables computer-use agents (CUAs) to improve through interaction with executable environments. However, existing methods primarily rely on sparse outcome rewards, which provide no sup...
arXiv:2606. 03841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent progress in Large Language Model (LLM) agents has enabled promising advances in automated data science.
By Zherui Yang, Fan Liu, Yansong Ning, Hao Liu
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