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arXiv · 2610.38637

On-Policy Self-Distillation with Teacher Evolution

Shufan Shen·Zhongni Hou·Chao Bi·Yufei Zhang·Guojun Yin·Shuhui Wang
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Abstract

On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), which aligns a student model's token-level distribution with that of its self-teacher prompted by privileged context, has emerged as a promising direction to mitigate reward sparsity in sequence-level post-training paradigms. However, OPSD often fails to achieve continuous performance gains during training. In this paper, we find that the model's limited self-teaching capability underlies this phenomenon by generating unreliable guidance on certain samples. To address this problem, we propose Teacher-Evolution Self-Distillation (TESD), which enables the self-teacher to generate rollouts and receive environmental feedback based on task correctness and context independence. First, using these rewards as training objectives, we perform teacher-oriented optimization to continuously enhance the model's self-teaching capability during distillation. Second, by estimating teacher guidance reliability from these rewards, we apply adaptive student-oriented optimization to down-weight samples with unreliable guidance. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and model scales show that TESD consistently outperforms representative token-level and sequence-level methods, highlighting the necessity of improving supervision quality in OPSD.

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Shufan Shen, Zhongni Hou, Chao Bi, Yufei Zhang, Guojun Yin, Shuhui Wang. 2026-10-28. On-Policy Self-Distillation with Teacher Evolution. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38637

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