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Self-Distilled Reasoner: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Large Language Models
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abstract
Knowledge distillation improves large language model (LLM) reasoning by compressing the knowledge of a teacher LLM to train smaller LLMs. On-policy distillation advances this approach by having the student sample its own trajectories while a teacher LLM provides dense token-level supervision, addressing the distribution mismatch between training and inference in off-policy distillation methods. However, on-policy distillation typically requires a separate, often larger, teacher LLM and does not explicitly leverage ground-truth solutions available in reasoning datasets. Inspired by the intuition that a sufficiently capable LLM can rationalize external privileged reasoning traces and teach its weaker self, we introduce On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), a learning algorithm where a single LLM acts as both teacher and student with different contexts. The teacher policy conditions on privileged information (e.g., verified reasoning traces) while the student policy sees only the question; training minimizes the per-token divergence between these distributions over the student's own rollouts. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks, achieving superior token efficiency compared to reinforcement learning methods and better performance over off-policy distillation methods. Code repo: https://github.com/siyan-zhao/OPSD.
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- abstract Knowledge distillation improves large language model (LLM) reasoning by compressing the knowledge of a teacher LLM to train smaller LLMs. On-policy distillation advances this approach by having the student sample its own trajectories while a teacher LLM provides dense token-level supervision, addressing the distribution mismatch between training and inference in off-policy distillation methods. However, on-policy distillation typically requires a separate, often larger, teacher LLM and does not explicitly leverage ground-truth solutions available in reasoning datasets. Inspired by the intuitio
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years
2026 50representative citing papers
EGRSD and CL-EGRSD advance the accuracy-length frontier in LLM reasoning by entropy-guided weighting of token-level distillation signals from the teacher.
MOPD improves on-policy distillation for LLMs by using peer successes for positive patterns and failures for negative examples to create more informative teacher signals.
dGRPO merges outcome-based policy optimization with dense teacher guidance from on-policy distillation, yielding more stable long-context reasoning on the new LongBlocks synthetic dataset.
ActGuide-RL uses human action data as plan-style guidance in mixed-policy RL to overcome exploration barriers in LLM agents, matching SFT+RL performance on search benchmarks without cold-start training.
GEAR reshapes GRPO trajectory advantages using divergence signals from a ground-truth-conditioned teacher to create adaptive token- and segment-level credit regions.
Self-distillation token rewards measure input-response-feedback pointwise mutual information, and CREDIT extracts the input-specific component with contrastive baselines to improve LLM reasoning performance.
Distillation signals align better with ideal updates on incorrect student rollouts than correct ones, with optimal teacher context depending on student capacity and task.
RLRT augments GRPO by reinforcing tokens on correct student rollouts that the teacher would not have predicted, outperforming standard self-distillation and exploration baselines on Qwen3 models.
TRACE improves math reasoning by distilling only on annotator-marked critical spans with forward KL on correct key spans, optional reverse KL on errors, and GRPO elsewhere, gaining 2.76 points over GRPO while preserving OOD performance.
TAD improves the accuracy-parallelism trade-off in diffusion LLMs via temporal-aware self-distillation that applies hard labels to soon-to-be-decoded tokens and soft supervision to future tokens.
Persistent 'Rock Tokens' in on-policy distillation resist teacher corrections, consume large gradient norms, yet add negligible value to reasoning, allowing targeted bypassing to streamline alignment.
LaTER reduces LLM token usage 16-33% on reasoning benchmarks by exploring in latent space then switching to explicit CoT verification, with gains like 70% to 73.3% on AIME 2025 in the training-free version.
PBSD derives a reward-reweighted teacher distribution as the analytic optimum of a reward-regularized objective, yielding better stability and performance than KL-based self-distillation on math reasoning and tool-use tasks.
MAD-OPD recasts on-policy distillation teachers as a debating collective to supply better supervision, lifting agentic and code performance over single-teacher OPD across multiple model sizes.
TCOD stabilizes on-policy distillation for multi-turn agents via temporal curriculum on trajectory depth, improving performance up to 18 points over vanilla OPD and sometimes surpassing the teacher.
NPO uses a policy's own near-future checkpoint as auxiliary trajectories to maximize effective learning signal S = Q/V, improving performance from 57.88 to 63.15 on Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct with GRPO while accelerating convergence.
OPD for LLMs suffers length inflation and repetition collapse; StableOPD uses reference divergence and rollout mixing to prevent it and improve math reasoning performance by 7.2% on average.
RLSD mixes self-distillation for token-level policy difference magnitudes with RLVR for reliable update directions from response correctness to reach higher convergence and better training stability.
Local teachability collapse in trajectory suffixes makes uniform dense supervision suboptimal in strong-to-weak OPD; truncating at BIC-style change points on teacher margin improves performance.
DAgger-style training with turn-level policy interpolation raises 4B and 8B LLM agents to 27.3% and 29.8% on SWE-bench Verified, beating several larger published systems.
Emergent and subliminal misalignment in LLMs arise from data structure interactions and transfer via benign distillation data, with stronger effects under shared functional structure and on-policy settings.
RESD turns failure trajectories into token-level supervision via retrospective reflections and a persistent global playbook, enabling faster improvement than standard self-distillation or GRPO with only one rollout per prompt.
GRAFT internalizes tool dependency graphs via dedicated special tokens in LLMs and applies on-policy context distillation to achieve higher exact sequence matching and dependency legality than prior external-graph methods.
citing papers explorer
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Combining On-Policy Optimization and Distillation for Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models
dGRPO merges outcome-based policy optimization with dense teacher guidance from on-policy distillation, yielding more stable long-context reasoning on the new LongBlocks synthetic dataset.
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Learning Agentic Policy from Action Guidance
ActGuide-RL uses human action data as plan-style guidance in mixed-policy RL to overcome exploration barriers in LLM agents, matching SFT+RL performance on search benchmarks without cold-start training.
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TAD: Temporal-Aware Trajectory Self-Distillation for Fast and Accurate Diffusion LLM
TAD improves the accuracy-parallelism trade-off in diffusion LLMs via temporal-aware self-distillation that applies hard labels to soon-to-be-decoded tokens and soft supervision to future tokens.
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Cornerstones or Stumbling Blocks? Deciphering the Rock Tokens in On-Policy Distillation
Persistent 'Rock Tokens' in on-policy distillation resist teacher corrections, consume large gradient norms, yet add negligible value to reasoning, allowing targeted bypassing to streamline alignment.
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LaTER: Efficient Test-Time Reasoning via Latent Exploration and Explicit Verification
LaTER reduces LLM token usage 16-33% on reasoning benchmarks by exploring in latent space then switching to explicit CoT verification, with gains like 70% to 73.3% on AIME 2025 in the training-free version.
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MAD-OPD: Breaking the Ceiling in On-Policy Distillation via Multi-Agent Debate
MAD-OPD recasts on-policy distillation teachers as a debating collective to supply better supervision, lifting agentic and code performance over single-teacher OPD across multiple model sizes.
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Demystifying OPD: Length Inflation and Stabilization Strategies for Large Language Models
OPD for LLMs suffers length inflation and repetition collapse; StableOPD uses reference divergence and rollout mixing to prevent it and improve math reasoning performance by 7.2% on average.
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Prefix Teach, Suffix Fade: Local Teachability Collapse in Strong-to-Weak On-Policy Distillation
Local teachability collapse in trajectory suffixes makes uniform dense supervision suboptimal in strong-to-weak OPD; truncating at BIC-style change points on teacher margin improves performance.
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AIPO: : Learning to Reason from Active Interaction
AIPO trains LLMs to expand their reasoning capability boundary via active multi-agent interaction with Verify, Knowledge, and Reasoning agents during RLVR, using importance sampling and clipping to handle feedback, then drops the agents at inference.
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SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents
SOD reweights on-policy distillation strength step-by-step using divergence to stabilize tool use in small language model agents, yielding up to 20.86% gains and 26.13% on AIME 2025 for a 0.6B model.
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Hidden States Know Where Reasoning Diverges: Credit Assignment via Span-Level Wasserstein Distance
Span-level Wasserstein distances between hidden-state distributions of correct and incorrect rollouts provide a self-supervised signal to reweight advantages in GRPO, improving fine-grained credit assignment on math and code tasks.
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UniSD: Towards a Unified Self-Distillation Framework for Large Language Models
UniSD unifies complementary self-distillation mechanisms for autoregressive LLMs and achieves up to +5.4 point gains over base models and +2.8 over baselines across six benchmarks and six models.
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Large Language Model Post-Training: A Unified View of Off-Policy and On-Policy Learning
LLM post-training is unified as off-policy or on-policy interventions that expand support for useful behaviors, reshape policies within reachable states, or consolidate behavior across training stages.