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.
By Luis Zuin, Alexis Huet, Dario Rossi, Zied Ben Houidi
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...
By Su Ee Tan, Xiaotong Ji, Rasul Tutunov, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Matthieu Zimmer
UniSD presents a unified self‑distillation framework for large language models, integrating mechanisms such as multi‑teacher agreement, EMA teacher stabilization, token‑level contrastive learning, feature matching, and divergence clipping to address supervision reliability, representation alignment, and training stability. Evaluated across six benchmarks and multiple model families, UniSD identifies when self‑distillation outperforms static imitation and which components contribute most to performance gains. The resulting UniSDfull pipeline achieves the best overall results, improving the base model by +5.4 points and surpassing the strongest baseline by +2.8 points, demonstrating self‑distillation as a practical, steerable method for efficient LLM adaptation without stronger external teachers.
By Yiqiao Jin, Yiyang Wang, Lucheng Fu, Yijia Xiao, Yinyi Luo, Haoxin Liu, B. Aditya Prakash, Chao Zhang, Josiah Hester, Jindong Wang, Srijan Kumar
The paper introduces Synthetic Self-Distillation (SynthSelf), a method that enables continual post‑training for small language models by outsourcing in‑distribution learning to a slightly larger aligner. SynthSelf combines off‑policy supervision and rejection sampling to provide high‑quality supervision while preserving the model’s original distribution. Experiments on four acquisition datasets and fourteen retention benchmarks show SynthSelf consistently outperforms six baseline methods across three small‑model scales, demonstrating its effectiveness for low‑latency, on‑device continual learning.
By Woosung Koh, Hyunsoo Lee, Kyungjae Lee, Haeju Park, Dahyun Lee, Dasol Hwang, Moontae Lee
arXiv:2610.14001v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) uses a self-teacher conditioned on privileged information to turn the sparse outcome signal of reinforcement learn...
By Yuhang Yang, Mingxuan Xia, Chao Ye, Shuai Zhu, Shouqing Yang, Haobo Wang, Shenzhi Yang, Zhengqing Zang, Chenglong Wang
arXiv:2607. 18082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rubric-based RL has recently shown promise in improving LLMs on open-ended tasks.
By Mingxuan Xia, Yuhang Yang, Chao Ye, Shuai Zhu, Shenzhi Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Yuhang Zhang, Cheng Peng, Haobo Wang, Siqing Wang