arXiv:2607. 22629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) produce long, explicit chains of intermediate steps before generating a final answer at inference time.
By Durgesh Kalwar, Vardhan Palod, Subbarao Kambhampati
arXiv:2607. 02234v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving LLM reasoning, where a privileged teacher with access to reference solutions provides token-level supervision on the student's own generated trajectories.
By Zhanming Shen, Jintao Tong, Shaotian Yan, Chen Shen, Hao Chen, Wentao Ye, Xiaomeng Hu, Rui Miao, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao, Gang Chen, Jieping Ye
arXiv:2605. 15532v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distillation enables compact Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to obtain strong reasoning capabilities, yet the prompts driving this process are typically chosen via simple heuristics or aggregated from off-the-shelf datasets.
By Jaehun Jung, Hyunwoo Kim, Brandon Cui, Ximing Lu, David Acuna, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Yejin Choi
arXiv:2605.10194v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) uses a model as its own teacher under privileged context, providing token-level supervision on the model's own r...
By Jiaxuan Wang, Xuan Ouyang, Zhiyu Chen, Yulan Hu, Lan-Zhe Guo
arXiv:2607. 05184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation is a promising recipe for self-improvement in language models.
By Simran Kaur, Narutatsu Ri, Yinghui He, Liam Fowl, Sanjeev Arora
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:2512. 21002v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distilling the capabilities from a large reasoning model (LRM) to a smaller student model often involves training on substantial amounts of reasoning data.
By Wei-Rui Chen, Vignesh Kothapalli, Ata Fatahibaarzi, Hejian Sang, Shao Tang, Qingquan Song, Zhipeng Wang, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
arXiv:2608.29623v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown strong performance on complex problems through long chain-of-thought (Long CoT) reasoning...
By Yangsong Lan, Renkai Hu, HongKai Zheng, Bo Zhang, Renzhi Wang, Hongliang Dai, Piji Li
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
arXiv:2605.13165v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Long chain-of-thought (Long CoT) reasoning improves performance on multi-step problems, but it also induces overthinking. This inefficiency is espe...
By Chenjun Xu, Zhennan Zhou, Zhan Su, Bill Howe, Lucy Lu Wang, Bingbing Wen
The paper investigates why self‑distillation can sometimes worsen the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). It finds that the process suppresses the model’s epistemic verbalization—its expression of uncertainty—leading to shorter but less accurate responses in mathematical reasoning tasks. Experiments on several LLMs show performance drops of up to 40%, especially on out‑of‑distribution problems where uncertainty expression is beneficial.
By Jeonghye Kim, Xufang Luo, Minbeom Kim, Sangmook Lee, Dohyung Kim, Jiwon Jeon, Dongsheng Li, Yuqing Yang
arXiv:2606. 17803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by scaling inference-time compute, yet remain fundamentally stateless, discarding the rich, self-produced reasoning traces generated during this process.
By Vaggelis Dorovatas, Nancy Kalaj, Rahaf Aljundi