arXiv AI
Aug 6

Privileged, but Biased: How PI-Conditioned Teachers Break Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608. 04794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation (SD) has emerged as a compute-efficient alternative to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards: a self-teacher, conditioned on privileged information (PI) about the answer such as a reference solution, supplies dense per-token supervision to a student that never sees it.

By Sarthak Harne, Chinmay Karkar, Yash Pandya, Ahmed Awadallah, Akshay Nambi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

VISTA: Verifier-Informed Student-to-Teacher Adaptation for On-Policy Self-Distillation

The paper introduces VISTA, a method that enhances on‑policy self‑distillation (OPSD) by adapting the teacher model toward the student’s distribution using outcome‑verified rollouts. VISTA keeps the standard OPSD student update but selectively adjusts the teacher only on the top‑k positions with the largest teacher‑student KL divergence, without adding new sampling or reward objectives. Experiments on AIME24, AIME25, and HMMT25 with Qwen3 models show that VISTA outperforms OPSD across all scales, improving Avg@12 by up to 2.1 points.

By Zewen Ding, Zezhong Wu, Zhou Tao, Shida Wang, Shizhuo Hou, YongXiang Hua, Haoyu Cao, Linli Xu
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Verify Before You Distill: Prompt-Level Teacher Gating for On-Policy Distillation

The paper introduces Teacher-Gated On-Policy Distillation (TGOPD), a method that verifies teacher reliability at the prompt level before applying dense supervision in on-policy distillation. TGOPD uses verifier-scored teacher probes to decide whether to route a prompt to dense OPD or to a verifier-grounded alternative. Experiments on 4B and 35B models across mathematics, code, and instruction tasks show TGOPD outperforms vanilla OPD and improves teacher GPU utilization from 9.8% to 78.9% in a 4B single-domain run.

By Zhiwei Zhang, Zechen Sun, Fei Zhao, Kang Peng, Bin Liang, Huayu Deng, Yao Hu, Kam-Fai Wong, Mu Chuan
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Reward-Gated On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2607. 04037v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation is a powerful way to transfer reasoning ability from a strong teacher to a smaller student: the student samples trajectories from its own policy, and the teacher provides dense token-level supervision on the states the student actually visits.

By Mohammad Sadegh Akhondzadeh, Vijay Lingam, Atula Tejaswi, Chanakya Ekbote, Sujay Sanghavi, Aleksandar Bojchevski