arXiv Machine Learning By Rongcan Pei, Zhepei Wei, Shuyao Xu, Xinyu Zhu, Wei-Lin Chen, Yu Meng

Negative Self-Distillation: Learning to Reason by Avoiding Flaws

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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.

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