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
Negative Self-Distillation (NSD) is a new framework for improving large language models by encouraging them to diverge from their own flawed reasoning rather than imitate privileged solutions. Unlike On-Policy Self-Distillation, which can suppress uncertainty and exploratory behavior, NSD generates a question‑specific negative condition (e.g., a careless reasoner) and uses a dynamic gating mechanism to target only reasoning‑critical tokens for penalization. This approach preserves foundational language capabilities while consistently outperforming OPSD and other label‑free self‑bootstrapping reinforcement learning baselines.
By Rongcan Pei, Zhepei Wei, Shuyao Xu, Xinyu Zhu, Wei-Lin Chen, Yu Meng
The paper introduces LM2LM, a method that trains large language models (LLMs) to propose improvements for other LLMs using reinforcement learning (RL). It employs a frozen research world model (RWM) to predict the gains of proposals, providing a cheaper surrogate reward, and periodically validates high‑scoring proposals to keep feedback reliable. Experiments across eight LM development environments show that LM2LM enables a Qwen3.8‑27B model to outperform GPT‑6‑sol on held‑out tasks while reducing data‑generation cost by 33%, and it generalizes to unseen model families.
By Minhua Lin, Zijun Wang, Zewen Liu, Zhaotian Weng, Bing He, Zhan Shi, Benoit Dumoulin, Xiang Zhang, Suhang Wang, Hanqing Lu
arXiv:2610.34137v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) enables large language models (LLMs) to continuously self-improve their reasoning capabilities....
By Wenhang Shi, Yiren Chen, Zhe Zhao, Jinhao Dong, Wei Lu, Xiaoyong Du
arXiv:2606. 09052v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-evolution offers a scalable path to stronger reasoning: a pretrained language model improves itself with only minimal external supervision.
By Siyu Chen, Miao Lu, Beining Wu, Heejune Sheen, Fengzhuo Zhang, Shuangning Li, Zhiyuan Li, Jose Blanchet, Tianhao Wang, Zhuoran Yang
arXiv:2606. 30704v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel across a wide range of tasks, yet their instance-specific solutions often lack the structural consistency needed for reliable deployment.
By Gan Luo, Zihan Qin, Bin Dong, Wotao Yin