arXiv AI By Fan Yang, Rui Meng, Yuxin Wen

Why Does Feedback-Augmented Self-Distillation Fail to Improve Retrieval-Interleaved Search Agents?

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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.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

OPDSearch+: On-Policy Distillation with RL Refinement for Search-Augmented Reasoning

OPDSearch+ introduces a two‑stage distillation framework for search‑augmented reasoning that eliminates the need for task‑specific teacher fine‑tuning. In the first stage, a frozen off‑the‑shelf instruct model guides a student through live search interactions using a per‑position forward KL objective, transferring reasoning decomposition and evidence integration skills. The second stage refines this student with reinforcement learning, achieving performance surpassing RL alone and outperforming all prior 3B‑parameter baselines on seven QA benchmarks, including 13.1% improvement on HotpotQA and 8.5% on 2WikiMultihopQA.

By Qinglin Ye, Zhiyuan Gu, Jingjie Xia, Yiheng Zhang, Kaiyan Zhao, Shunchao Zheng, Yuhang Mu, Wenchao Du, Yiming Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 22

H$^2$SD: Hybrid Hindsight Self-Distillation

arXiv:2607. 18955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models on tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation.

By Qiye Cai, Yichuan Ma, Linyang Li, Peiji Li, Yongkang Chen, Qipeng Guo, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Xiaocheng Feng, Bing Qin
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

One Symptom, Three Levers: A Critical Review of On-Policy Self-Distillation

The paper reviews On‑Policy Self‑Distillation (OPSD), a method where a language model learns from its own generations using privileged information such as reference solutions or plans, eliminating the need for a larger teacher model. It identifies a key failure mode—collapse, where the model’s reasoning paths narrow progressively—and analyzes it through three levers: signal application, privileged information, and teacher dynamics. The review focuses on mathematical reasoning, offering a unified vocabulary and distinguishing settled facts from ongoing debates.

By Justin Robert, Raheel Qader