arXiv AI
Jul 3

Procedural Memory Distillation: Online Reflection for Self-Improving Language Models

arXiv:2607. 01480v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), along with recent selfdistillation variants such as SDPO, evaluates each rollout against a verifier and updates the policy from that episode-level signal.

By Ye Liu, Srijan Bansal, Bo Pang, Yang Li, Zeyu Leo Liu, Yifei Ming, Zixuan Ke, Shafiq Joty, Semih Yavuz
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Draft-OPD: On-Policy Distillation for Speculative Draft Models

Draft-OPD introduces an on‑policy distillation method for speculative draft models, addressing the mismatch between supervised fine‑tuning and inference by letting the target model supervise the drafter on draft‑induced states. The approach uses target‑assisted rollouts for stable continuations and replays drafting from error positions exposed during verification, enabling the drafter to learn from both accepted and rejected proposals. Experiments demonstrate that Draft‑OPD achieves more than five‑fold lossless acceleration across diverse tasks, outperforming prior draft models such as EAGLE‑3 and DFlash by 23 % and 13 % respectively.

By Haodi Lei, Yafu Li, Haoran Zhang, Shunkai Zhang, Qianjia Cheng, Xiaoye Qu, Ganqu Cui, Bowen Zhou, Ning Ding, Yun Luo, Yu Cheng
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Recursive Self-Improvement via On-Policy Distillation for Reasoning

The paper introduces a recursive self-improvement framework for language models that replaces an external teacher with a frozen copy of the student, enabling dynamic co-evolution (DCE) and self-refined concise learning (SRCL). DCE allows the privileged teacher to evolve alongside the student, while SRCL trains on shorter, verified rewrites to reduce verbosity. Experiments show that the combined DCE+SRCL approach outperforms traditional on‑policy self‑distillation across multiple model sizes and math benchmarks, achieving significant accuracy gains and shorter outputs.

By Shangjian Yin, Zehao Zhao, Kavosh Asadi, Rui Liu, Yuchen Lu, Shike Mei, Hang Cui, Luke Simon, Zhouxing Shi, Hamed Firooz