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.
By Meilin Yang (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Zixuan Ding (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Jianhao Nie (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Weite Zhang (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Yuxin Zhang (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Zhiming Shao (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Li Yu (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China), Zhe Fu (Renmin University of China, Beijing, China)
arXiv:2606. 04703v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Experience internalization converts contextual experience from past interactions into reusable parametric capability, offering a promising path toward continual learning in large language models (LLMs).
By Jingwen Chen, Wenkai Yang, Shengda Fan, Wenbo Nie, Chenxing Sun, Shaodong Zheng, Yangen Hu, Lu Pan, Ke Zeng, Yankai Lin
arXiv:2606. 08432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a central post-training tool for large language models (LLMs), providing dense per-token teacher supervision along the student's own rollouts.
By Li Jiang, Haoran Xu, Yichuan Ding, Amy Zhang
arXiv:2607. 28022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model training in open-ended domains lacks verifiable rewards, making task preferences difficult to formalize as effective supervision.
By Yuran Wang, Zekun Wang, Bohan Zeng, Ruixu Zhang, Wenxuan Liu, Liu Yang, Yifan Dai, Yang Shi, Bozhou Li, Chengzhuo Tong, Daili Hua, Yuanxing Zhang, Wentao Zhang
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:2608. 03632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-Policy distillation (OPD) transfers teacher capabilities by supervising student-sampled trajectories with dense token-level teacher signals.
By Yinuo Jiang, Yongjie Ye, Zhou Tao, Xiang Zhuang, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen, Tiankai Li