Rebellious Student: Reversing Teacher Signals for Reasoning Exploration with Self-Distilled RLVR
Self-distillation has emerged as a powerful framework for post-training LLMs, where a teacher conditioned on extra information guides a student without it, both from the same model. While this guidance is useful when the student has failed, on successful rollouts, the same mechanism instead overwrites the student's choices and suppresses it's own reasoning. Therefore, we propose reading the original self-distillation signal in reverse: when the student succeeds along a path the teacher would not have predicted, these tokens reflect its self-driven reasoning. Building on this, we propose RLRT (RLVR with Reversed Teacher), which augments GRPO by reinforcing these tokens on correct rollouts....
| Authors | Jeonghye Kim, Jiwon Jeon, Dongsheng Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 11 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 May 2026 |
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