CL-Bench is the first expert-validated benchmark for continual learning in frontier LLMs across six real-world domains, showing limited gains and that naive in-context learning outperforms dedicated memory systems.
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Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning
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abstract
Continual learning, enabling models to acquire new skills and knowledge without degrading existing capabilities, remains a fundamental challenge for foundation models. While on-policy reinforcement learning can reduce forgetting, it requires explicit reward functions that are often unavailable. Learning from expert demonstrations, the primary alternative, is dominated by supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which is inherently off-policy. We introduce Self-Distillation Fine-Tuning (SDFT), a simple method that enables on-policy learning directly from demonstrations. SDFT leverages in-context learning by using a demonstration-conditioned model as its own teacher, generating on-policy training signals that preserve prior capabilities while acquiring new skills. Across skill learning and knowledge acquisition tasks, SDFT consistently outperforms SFT, achieving higher new-task accuracy while substantially reducing catastrophic forgetting. In sequential learning experiments, SDFT enables a single model to accumulate multiple skills over time without performance regression, establishing on-policy distillation as a practical path to continual learning from demonstrations.
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- abstract Continual learning, enabling models to acquire new skills and knowledge without degrading existing capabilities, remains a fundamental challenge for foundation models. While on-policy reinforcement learning can reduce forgetting, it requires explicit reward functions that are often unavailable. Learning from expert demonstrations, the primary alternative, is dominated by supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which is inherently off-policy. We introduce Self-Distillation Fine-Tuning (SDFT), a simple method that enables on-policy learning directly from demonstrations. SDFT leverages in-context learning
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2026 72representative citing papers
QVal is a new evaluation framework that directly measures dense supervision quality via Q-alignment to a reference policy, showing simple prompting baselines outperform 21 other methods across environments and models.
OPRD performs distillation in hidden-state space on on-policy data for deterministic gradients and better math benchmark performance, plus OPRD-Bridge for cross-architecture transfer via low-rank projectors.
GeoDrive-Bench is a new multimodal benchmark and distillation method for testing and improving VLMs on region-specific traffic-rule reasoning in autonomous driving across six countries.
OPD+ removes the bias from stop-gradient in on-policy distillation by deriving correct gradients for f-divergences, outperforming standard KL-based methods on math reasoning and tool-use tasks.
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.
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.
OPHSD uses harness-augmented models as teachers to distill reasoning capabilities into base LLMs, yielding strong standalone performance on classification and math tasks.
vOPD stabilizes on-policy distillation gradients by subtracting a closed-form per-token negative reverse KL baseline as a detached control variate, preserving unbiasedness while lowering variance and matching expensive full-vocabulary methods.
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.
GUI-SD introduces on-policy self-distillation with visually enriched privileged context and entropy-guided weighting, outperforming GRPO and naive OPSD on six GUI grounding benchmarks while improving training efficiency.
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.
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.
A single LLM improves its own reasoning by self-distilling from privileged verified traces as teacher to its question-only student policy, outperforming off-policy distillation and RL on math benchmarks with better token efficiency.
Z-Reward trains a 27B reasoning teacher VLM on score distributions via GDSO and distills it via RISD into a 9B student, reaching 89.6% and 88.6% human preference accuracy with 41.3% optimization gain over SFT baseline.
On-policy distillation from a frozen autoregressive teacher to a bidirectional student eliminates train-inference mismatch and enables data-efficient ARLM-to-DLM conversion.
Language models can use a two-stage sleep process of upward distillation for memory consolidation and RL-based dreaming for unsupervised self-improvement to enable continual learning.
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