arXiv AI
Jun 10
The Role of Feedback Alignment in Self-Distillation
arXiv:2606. 11173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conditioning a language model on additional context, such as feedback on a previous attempt, typically improves its response.
Disentangling Self-Distillation: Measuring and Modeling Acquisition and Retention
The paper investigates self‑distillation techniques for language models by systematically varying three key design choices: the source of rollout tokens (student vs. teacher), the teacher coupling strategy (frozen or exponential moving average), and the KL divergence direction (reverse or forward). Experiments on Qwen2.5‑7B and Ministral‑3‑3B across 1,200 adaptation runs reveal that rollout source mainly affects acquisition on contradictory tasks, teacher coupling most strongly influences acquisition across all tasks, and KL direction impacts retention differently depending on the model. A controlled theoretical model reproduces these empirical trends, offering a unified framework for understanding acquisition‑retention trade‑offs in self‑distillation.
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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27
One Symptom, Three Levers: A Critical Review of On-Policy Self-Distillation
The paper reviews On‑Policy Self‑Distillation (OPSD), a method where a language model learns from its own generations using privileged information such as reference solutions or plans, eliminating the need for a larger teacher model. It identifies a key failure mode—collapse, where the model’s reasoning paths narrow progressively—and analyzes it through three levers: signal application, privileged information, and teacher dynamics. The review focuses on mathematical reasoning, offering a unified vocabulary and distinguishing settled facts from ongoing debates.
arXiv AI
4d ago
Beam Search as Test-Time Self-Distillation via Counterfactual Contexts
arXiv:2609.37041v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-Distillation Fine-Tuning (SDFT) enables a language model to act as its own teacher: by conditioning on a demonstration, the model produces an im...
arXiv AI
Sep 21
On Repulsive and Attractive Teachers: Separating Correctness from Behavior in Self-Distillation
The paper investigates how on-policy self‑distillation can alter a model’s behavior by conditioning on privileged information. It contrasts attractive self‑distillation, which pulls a model toward a privileged teacher, with repulsive self‑distillation, which pushes it away, showing that attraction reduces exploratory reasoning while repulsion lengthens responses and can destabilize the model. The authors propose a contrastive self‑distillation objective that combines attraction to a correct‑solution teacher with repulsion from an incorrect‑solution teacher, finding that this approach improves reasoning performance across various model types while keeping response lengths stable.
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18
What Does Privileged Information Add to On-Policy Self-Distillation?
The paper investigates how privileged information—such as a teacher’s full solution or reasoning trace—affects on‑policy self‑distillation (OPSD) in language models. Using the AMPLE‑Math benchmark, the authors compare distillation with and without extra teacher views, finding that reference‑free distillation explains most gains for Qwen3‑1.7B, while additional references provide modest benefits, especially for polished solutions. The study also shows that the impact of privileged data depends on the student’s training regime and that altering token‑level supervision can leave student behavior largely unchanged.
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 26
One Symptom, Three Levers: A Critical Review of On-Policy Self-Distillation
On-policy distillation trains a language model on its own generations while a teacher scores them token by token. It combines the dense supervision of imitation learning with the on-policy sampling of...
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago
Overcoming Scaling Limits in On-Policy Self-Distillation for LLM Reasoning
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 AI
Jun 10
Adaptive Teacher Exposure for Self-Distillation in LLM Reasoning
arXiv:2605. 11458v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy self-distillation has become a strong recipe for LLM reasoning, where a privileged teacher supervises the student's own rollouts while conditioning on the reference solution.
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11
Adaptive Supervised Anchoring for On-Policy Self-Distillation
arXiv:2608. 07935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) adapts a language model by distilling guidance from a frozen teacher on trajectories sampled from the student.
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22
iSDFT: Information-Proximal Self-Distillation for Continual Learning in LLMs
arXiv:2609.24646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation fine-tuning (SDFT) learns new skills from demonstrations while reducing forgetting, but it always distils toward the full d...
arXiv AI
Jul 3
Purified OPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation Without Losing How to Think
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.
arXiv AI
Aug 11
WDL-OPD: Weak-Driven On-Policy Distillation via Mixture-Constrained Co-Training
arXiv:2608. 09447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) aligns a student with a teacher on trajectories sampled from the student itself, reducing the train-test state mismatch of offline distillation.