Skill-Conditioned Gated Self-Distillation (SGSD) for LLM Reasoning
SGSD is a new on-policy self-distillation method for LLM reasoning that replaces trusted privileged information (e.g., reference answers) with an experience-derived skill bank of skill-mistake pairs. It constructs a multi-teacher pool, validates each teacher's contribution via a verifier, and applies a gated objective to distill informative disagreements while suppressing noisy signals. On Qwen3-1.7B, SGSD outperforms GRPO by 6.2% and answer-conditioned OPSD by 1.7% on average across AIME24, AIME25, and HMMT25. The method relaxes the assumption of trusted privileged information, making self-distillation more practical under weaker supervision.
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Self-Policy Distillation via Capability-Selective Subspace Projection
This paper introduces Self-Policy Distillation (SPD), a self-distillation method for LLMs that requires no external signals such as correctness filters or reward models. SPD extracts a low-rank capability subspace from the model's own gradients on correctness-defining tokens, then projects KV activations into this subspace during self-generation to isolate task-relevant signal from stylistic noise. Experiments across code generation, math reasoning, and QA show up to 13% improvement over prior signal-free self-distillation methods and 15% better out-of-domain generalization.
Rubric-Conditioned Self-Distillation: structured feedback for reasoning model post-training
A new arXiv preprint proposes Rubric-Conditioned Self-Distillation (RCSD), a post-training framework that replaces scalar reward signals and noisy chain-of-thought annotations with structured rubrics for fine-grained credit assignment. The method conditions a teacher model on criterion-level rubrics to provide token-level guidance on the student's own sampled trajectories, avoiding reliance on a single reference rationale. Evaluated on science reasoning benchmarks, RCSD outperforms GRPO by 1.0 points and OPSD by 0.9 points on average.
d-OPSD: First on-policy self-distillation framework tailored for diffusion LLMs
Researchers introduce d-OPSD, the first on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) framework designed specifically for diffusion large language models (dLLMs). The method addresses a fundamental mismatch between existing autoregressive OPSD approaches and dLLMs' arbitrary-order generation by using suffix conditioning on self-generated answers and step-level rather than token-level divergence supervision. Across four reasoning benchmarks, d-OPSD outperforms RLVR and SFT baselines while requiring only ~10% of the optimization steps of RLVR, suggesting strong sample efficiency gains for dLLM post-training.
Step-aligned critique outperforms GRPO and reference-solution conditioning in self-distillation
A new arXiv paper investigates context design for self-distillation of language models, comparing binary reward (GRPO), reference solutions, and step-by-step critiques aligned to the solver's reasoning trace. Step-aligned critique yields the largest gains, outperforming GRPO by 16.11 points and reference-solution conditioning by 5.27 points on Avg@12. Per-token advantage analysis shows that step-aligned feedback targets only failing tokens, avoiding unnecessary pressure on already-correct reasoning steps. The findings suggest structural alignment between feedback and the model's reasoning trace is a key driver of self-distillation effectiveness.
ExpRL: RL-based mid-training using human QA data as reward scaffolds for LLM reasoning
ExpRL proposes an automated approach to LLM mid-training that replaces manually curated reasoning traces with large corpora of human-written QA data used as reward scaffolds rather than imitation targets. Reference solutions are hidden from the policy and used only to construct problem-specific grading rubrics, enabling dense process-level rewards that reinforce partial progress and intermediate reasoning steps. On challenging math reasoning benchmarks, ExpRL outperforms SFT, sparse-reward GRPO, and self-distillation as an RL initialization strategy, with additional mixed-domain experiments suggesting broader applicability.
Canonical-Context On-Policy Distillation (CCOPD) for Multi-Turn LLM Consistency
This paper identifies 'self-anchored drift' as a key failure mode in multi-turn LLMs: when information is revealed incrementally across turns, models produce unsupported assumptions that distort final answers, even when the total evidence is identical to a single-prompt setting. The authors propose Canonical-Context On-Policy Distillation (CCOPD), which trains a student model on incremental multi-turn conversations to match the output distribution of a frozen teacher conditioned on the full clean prompt. Trained only on math conversations, CCOPD achieves a 32% average relative improvement on multi-turn (RAW-SHARDED) tasks and generalizes zero-shot to five out-of-domain task families while preserving single-prompt performance.
Question-Answering as Hidden State Probing for Test-Time Reasoning Intervention
This paper proposes using question-asking as an inference-time intervention to surface information about an LLM's hidden state during chain-of-thought reasoning. The authors train a probe on a student model's hidden states before and after question generation, finding it predictive of final answer correctness even before the teacher responds—suggesting self-diagnosis during question generation carries meaningful signal. They frame question-asking as a sequential decision problem with a gating policy, but find a gap between detection and recovery: interventions are as likely to harm correct trajectories as to fix incorrect ones. The results have implications for the limits of LLM self-refinement under uncertainty.
OPCoD: On-Policy Co-Distillation for Mutual LLM Improvement via Peer Feedback
Researchers introduce On-Policy Co-Distillation (OPCoD), a training framework where two LLMs, each stronger in a different domain, iteratively tutor each other using on-policy rollouts and peer feedback. The method uses cognizance-based gating to control when feedback is given and feedback anchoring to ground it in the problem context. On Science Q&A tasks, OPCoD achieves Pareto improvement for both models across all evaluated domain pairs, outperforming one-way distillation and single-model fine-tuning baselines.