arXiv AI
UniSD: Towards a Unified Self-Distillation Framework for Large Language Models
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
Related stories
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7
Uni-OPD: Unifying On-Policy Distillation with a Dual-Perspective Recipe
arXiv:2605. 03677v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for consolidating the capabilities of specialized expert models into a single student model.
arXiv AI
Oct 1
Disentangling Self-Distillation: Measuring and Modeling Acquisition and Retention
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.
arXiv AI
Jul 21
Why Does Feedback-Augmented Self-Distillation Fail to Improve Retrieval-Interleaved Search Agents?
arXiv:2607. 17558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) offers a promising approach for training large language models without relying on a separate teacher model.
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 28
Strong Teacher Not Needed? On Distillation in LLM Pretraining
The paper investigates whether a strong teacher is necessary for knowledge distillation in large language model pretraining. By varying teacher and student sizes and token budgets, the authors create strong‑to‑weak, same‑level, and weak‑to‑strong teacher‑student pairs and evaluate distillation effectiveness. They find that even small, undertrained teachers can improve larger students when losses are properly mixed, and that pushing teachers to be stronger can saturate or reverse gains, while distillation mainly boosts generalization rather than in‑domain fitting.
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11
Adaptive Supervised Anchoring for On-Policy Self-Distillation
arXiv:2608. 07935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) adapts a language model by distilling guidance from a frozen teacher on trajectories sampled from the student.
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25
SelFusion: Self-distillation for Diffusion Language Models
arXiv:2608.22898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) alleviate the inherent latency bottleneck of autoregressive (AR) large language models (LLMs), but their degraded gene...