arXiv Computation and Language By Yuhan Liu, Xiyao Ma, Zhongkai Sun, Xu Han, Chengyuan Ma, Benjamin Z. Yao, Chenlei Guo

Which Skill to Distill? SGUID: Selecting a Compact Skill Bank for Model-Skill Co-Evolution

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

The paper introduces SGUID, a method that selects a compact subset of skills for distillation in large language models. It shows that fewer than 25% of retrieved skills are useful for on‑policy distillation and that distilling only the selected skills can match or surpass full‑bank distillation while using up to 11× fewer skills. SGUID also enables stable model‑skill co‑evolution by iteratively curating new skill banks from updated model rollouts.

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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