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Purified OPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation Without Losing How to Think

paperactiveprovisionalpurified-opsd-on-policy-self-distillation-without-losing-how-to-think-b83707ee·1 events·first seen 12h ago

Aliases: Purified OPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation Without Losing How to Think

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6arXiv · cs.AI·12h ago·source ↗

Purified OPSD fixes on-policy self-distillation failures in long chain-of-thought reasoning models

A new arXiv preprint identifies why on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) consistently degrades long chain-of-thought reasoning models: the teacher's supervision signal is dominated by reference-induced shortcuts rather than question-conditioned, transferable corrections. The authors propose a two-step fix using a reference-only teacher to isolate the non-transferable component and pointwise mutual information (PMI) to construct a cleaner distillation target. Experiments across four long-CoT models on two datasets show consistent improvements over both the base model and standard OPSD while preserving reflective reasoning behavior.