Sampling multiple solutions and returning the majority answer is among the most reliable ways to improve the reasoning accuracy of large language models without labels, and a growing family of methods converts this consensus signal into training supervision. However, existing approaches use consensus only in restricted forms: as a filter that selects solutions for fine-tuning, as a preference between answers, or as a scalar reward for reinforcement learning, discarding most of the information that the agreeing solutions contain.
arXiv:2607. 18955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models on tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation.
By Qiye Cai, Yichuan Ma, Linyang Li, Peiji Li, Yongkang Chen, Qipeng Guo, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Xiaocheng Feng, Bing Qin
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
SIPO (Self‑Instructing Policy Optimization) unifies reinforcement learning with on‑policy self‑distillation by using a contrastive self‑teacher to generate token‑level credit signals. The method samples multiple rollouts per prompt, pairs each with a reference answer and its mistakes, and uses the difference in teacher log‑probabilities to provide dense feedback while still respecting the overall task reward. Experiments on reasoning and code‑generation benchmarks show that SIPO outperforms both RLVR and OPSD baselines without requiring an external teacher or extra generation steps.
By Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Yueqi Wang, Yaokun Liu, Fengran Mo, Jinghan Zhang, Mung Yao Jia, Gyuseok Lee, Yang Zhang, Na Wei, Dong Wang
The paper reports that in on‑policy distillation for large language models, reasoning performance can be improved by supervising only a tiny fraction of generated tokens—sometimes just one or two tokens per reasoning trajectory, about 0.05% of all tokens. This sparse supervision consistently matches or exceeds full‑token training across nine teacher‑student setups on mathematical reasoning, and is also validated on coding reasoning, Llama models, and PPO‑based reinforcement learning with verifiable reward. The findings suggest that effective post‑training does not require token‑intensive supervision and may align more closely with natural learning processes that focus on critical reasoning steps.
By Zhishuai Liu, Xingzi Xu, Mehmet Saygin Seyfioglu, Pan Xu, Karim Bouyarmane
Post-training of reasoning language models is commonly driven by supervised distillation and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. Distillation often relies on chain-of-thought annotations that are expensive to obtain and may themselves be noisy, incomplete, or partially incorrect; even when the final solution is correct, an imperfect rationale can interfere with learning.
arXiv:2608. 03119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves LLM reasoning but typically relies on ground-truth (GT) answers, limiting scalability.
By Yongshi Ye, Liang Zhang, Yidong Chen, Xiaodong Shi, Biao Fu
arXiv:2607. 02460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training large language models (LLMs) without real-world interaction feedback or human-labeled supervision remains challenging, particularly in specialized domains where expert annotations are costly to obtain.
By Zhuowei Chen, Xiang Lorraine Li
arXiv:2608. 08764v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation improves language-model reasoning by querying a teacher on states actually visited by the student.
By Jiaxin Guo, Yanwei Yue, Xuanbo Fan, Chunyu Yang, Yan Zhang
arXiv:2608.24696v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) and on-policy distillation (OPD) have become two widely adopted paradigms for post-training lar...
By Wenze Lin, Jiale Zhao, Xitai Jiang, Songde Rao, Yining Li, Shenzhi Wang, Bingxiang He, Gao Huang
Post-training large language models (LLMs) without real-world interaction feedback or human-labeled supervision remains challenging, particularly in specialized domains where expert annotations are costly to obtain. Recent annotation-free self-evolution methods address this by using the model's own outputs as supervision signals, constructing a teacher via additional context and aggregating predictions across multiple rollouts through majority voting to produce pseudo-labels.
arXiv:2608.23493v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Self-reflection is a powerful mechanism for credit assignment in human learning, converting sparse outcome feedback into actionable guidance. However,...
By Jialong Liu, Yuling Shi, Ning Yang, Xiaodong Gu, Zuchao Li