AnyFlow enables any-step video diffusion by distilling flow-map transitions over arbitrary time intervals with on-policy backward simulation.
hub Mixed citations
Self-Distilled Reasoner: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Large Language Models
Mixed citation behavior. Most common role is background (58%).
79
Pith papers citing it
Background
58% of classified citations
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.
hub tools
citation-role summary
background 16
method 5
baseline 3
other 2
citation-polarity summary
claims ledger
- 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
co-cited works
years
2026 79representative citing papers
EDGE-OPD adds guided rollouts and evidence masking to on-policy self-distillation, enabling successful learning of target identities where standard OPSD and RLSD fail.
CEPO sharpens token credit in RLVR by requiring tokens to be favored by the correct answer and disfavored by wrong answers drawn from rejected rollouts, delivering accuracy gains on five multimodal math benchmarks.
Next-acceleration-scale autoregressive prediction in discrete latent space with on-policy privileged information distillation yields improved MRI reconstructions from sparse measurements on the fastMRI benchmark.
A planner-orchestrator system learns long-horizon image editing by maximizing outcome-based rewards from a vision-language judge and refining plans from successful trajectories.
VPD frames language feedback learning as variational EM so the teacher policy refines itself via trust-region updates on outcomes while the student learns dense token distributions on its own rollouts, outperforming fixed-teacher baselines on reasoning and code tasks.
EGRSD and CL-EGRSD advance the accuracy-length frontier in LLM reasoning by entropy-guided weighting of token-level distillation signals from the teacher.
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.
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.
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.
PACED applies student pass-rate weighting w(p)=p(1-p) to distillation, concentrating on the zone of proximal development and delivering up to +8.2 gains on AIME tasks with reduced forgetting.
DASD improves math reasoning in LLMs by adaptively directing self-distillation based on per-token entropy to balance exploration and step accuracy, outperforming prior self-distillation and RLVR baselines on six benchmarks.
OPPO derives token-level advantages for LLM RL via Bayesian recursion on oracle signals, recovering prior distillation methods as a special case and showing gains on math and code benchmarks.
On-Policy Consistency Training (OPCT) improves LLM safety metrics over supervised fine-tuning while largely preserving capabilities across three model families.
citing papers explorer
-
Self-Distilled Reinforcement Learning for Co-Evolving Agentic Recommender Systems
CoARS enables co-evolving recommender and user agents by using interaction-derived rewards and self-distilled credit assignment to internalize multi-turn feedback into model parameters, outperforming prior agentic baselines.
-
PolicyLong: Towards On-Policy Context Extension
PolicyLong shifts long-context data synthesis to an on-policy loop that re-screens contexts using the evolving model's entropy landscape, producing a self-curriculum that outperforms static offline baselines with larger gains at longer lengths.
-
CRISP: Compressed Reasoning via Iterative Self-Policy Distillation
CRISP achieves 57-59% token reduction on MATH-500 with 9-16 point accuracy gains on Qwen3 models via iterative self-distillation of concise reasoning behavior.
-
Learning beyond Teacher: Generalized On-Policy Distillation with Reward Extrapolation
Generalized on-policy distillation with reward scaling above one (ExOPD) lets student models surpass teacher performance when merging domain experts on math and code tasks.
-
GenEvolve: Self-Evolving Image Generation Agents via Tool-Orchestrated Visual Experience Distillation
GenEvolve introduces a self-evolving agent framework for image generation using tool-orchestrated trajectories and Visual Experience Distillation to achieve claimed SOTA results on benchmarks.
-
AMR-SD: Asymmetric Meta-Reflective Self-Distillation for Token-Level Credit Assignment
AMR-SD adds a reflection bottleneck to compress diagnostic signals into self-generated hints and uses asymmetric Causal Information Gain to create sparse token-level advantage signals, outperforming baselines and preventing late-stage collapse in RLVR.
-
$\boldsymbol{f}$-OPD: Stabilizing Long-Horizon On-Policy Distillation with Freshness-Aware Control
f-OPD decomposes on-policy distillation drift into rollout and supervision components, then applies a sample-level freshness score to adaptively limit stale data influence and stabilize long-horizon agent training.
-
On-Policy Distillation with Best-of-N Teacher Rollout Selection
BRTS improves on-policy distillation by sampling multiple teacher rollouts and selecting the best one via a correctness-first then alignment priority rule, yielding gains on AIME and AMC math benchmarks.
-
Reasoning Compression with Mixed-Policy Distillation
Mixed-Policy Distillation transfers concise reasoning behavior from larger to smaller LLMs by having the teacher compress student-generated trajectories, cutting token usage up to 27% while raising benchmark scores.
-
Self-Play Enhancement via Advantage-Weighted Refinement in Online Federated LLM Fine-Tuning with Real-Time Feedback
SPEAR enables online federated LLM fine-tuning by using feedback-guided self-play to create contrastive pairs trained with maximum likelihood on correct completions and confidence-weighted unlikelihood on incorrect ones, outperforming baselines without ground-truth contexts.
-
VISD: Enhancing Video Reasoning via Structured Self-Distillation
VISD proposes structured self-distillation with a multi-dimensional judge model and direction-magnitude decoupling to improve token-level credit assignment and convergence speed in VideoLLM reasoning training.
-
On-Policy Distillation of Language Models for Autonomous Vehicle Motion Planning
On-policy GKD trains 5x smaller student LLMs to nearly match large teacher performance in AV motion planning on nuScenes while beating a dense-feedback RL baseline.
-
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.
-
It Takes Two: Complementary Self-Distillation for Contextual Integrity in LLMs
SELFCI uses complementary self-distillation with two reverse KL divergences to align LLMs to contextual integrity while preserving utility, outperforming RL baselines like GRPO in agentic settings.
-
OneSearch-V2: The Latent Reasoning Enhanced Self-distillation Generative Search Framework
OneSearch-V2 improves generative retrieval via latent reasoning and self-distillation, achieving +3.98% item CTR, +2.07% buyer volume, and +2.11% order volume in online A/B tests.
-
A Brief Overview: On-Policy Self-Distillation In Large Language Models
This overview paper explains the conceptual foundations and design principles of On-Policy Self-Distillation for large language models from a beginner's perspective.
- Unlocking Proactivity in Task-Oriented Dialogue
- Adapting the Interface, Not the Model: Runtime Harness Adaptation for Deterministic LLM Agents
- Vision-OPD: Learning to See Fine Details for Multimodal LLMs via On-Policy Self-Distillation
- Post-Trained MoE Can Skip Half Experts via Self-Distillation
- MixSD: Mixed Contextual Self-Distillation for Knowledge Injection
- Prefix Teach, Suffix Fade: Local Teachability Collapse in Strong-to-Weak On-Policy Distillation
- Multi-Rollout On-Policy Distillation via Peer Successes and Failures
- A Recipe for Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models via On-Policy Optimization and Distillation
- Hide to See: Reasoning-prefix Masking for Visual-anchored Thinking in VLM Distillation
- Adaptive Teacher Exposure for Self-Distillation in LLM Reasoning
- Cornerstones or Stumbling Blocks? Deciphering the Rock Tokens in On-Policy Distillation
- D-OPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Continuously Tuning Step-Distilled Diffusion Models
- $\pi$-Play: Multi-Agent Self-Play via Privileged Self-Distillation without External Data