arXiv:2607. 28582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising approach to improve reasoning language models, but it remains brittle in practice: making it work reliably often requires substantial engineering effort.
By Jiawei Xu, Minghui Liu, Juzheng Zhang, Tom Goldstein, Furong Huang
The paper introduces Joint On-Policy Learning and Teaching (JOLT), a method that trains a single policy to act both as a privileged teacher and an unprivileged student. It derives a condition ensuring the teacher’s distillation update aligns positively with the student’s reward gradient, leading to a KL‑regularized teacher objective that matches the student’s current capabilities. Experiments show JOLT improves training efficiency and performance across various tasks, with additional gains when student rewards are incorporated.
By Randy Ardywibowo, Arnav Dalal, Jiantao Jiao
arXiv:2608. 08176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves the reasoning abilities of LLMs by internalizing privileged context into model parameters through self-distillation.
By Yongkang Yang, Zhezheng Hao, Hong Zhang, Yi Liu, Xiankun Lin, Wence Ji, Fanjunduo Wei, Jiarui Yu, Qiang Lin, Xiaoyun Liang, Hande Dong
arXiv:2609.17474v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) distillation aims to transfer the capabilities of a powerful teacher to a smaller student. Direct imitation, however, can...
By Haichen Hu, Yuheng Zhang, David Simchi-Levi
TeachBack is a bidirectional preference-learning framework for on‑policy self‑distillation that teaches a language model not only from a privileged Teacher but also how the Teacher should teach. By controlling the length of the reference‑reasoning suffix and varying prompt style, TeachBack encourages the Teacher to explore and re‑solve problems, reducing reliance on the reference solution while maintaining comparable accuracy. Experiments on mathematical and logical reasoning tasks demonstrate that TeachBack consistently improves Student performance over existing OPSD methods and related baselines.
By Linfei Ji (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Jiayun Li (Tsinghua University), Haozhao Wang (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Siyu Jiang (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Zehao Wang (Harbin Institute of Technology), Longtao Xiao (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Yu-Jie Yuan (Huawei Technologies Ltd), Ruixuan Li (Huazhong University of Science and Technology)
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.
By Zihao Han, Tiangang Zhang, Huaibin Wang, Yilun Sun