When Are Teacher Tokens Reliable? Position-Weighted On-Policy Self-Distillation for Reasoning
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a student on its own rollouts using a privileged teacher, but its standard objective weights all generated tokens equally, implicitly treating the privileged teacher target as equally reliable at every student-visited prefix. Existing entropy-based OPD methods relax this uniformity by modulating token-level supervision with teacher entropy, but high teacher entropy in reasoning has an ambiguous reliability meaning: it can reflect either non-viable uncertainty or benign solution diversity. To identify this phenomenon, we introduce a branch-viability diagnostic. Specifically, we record next-token alternatives from the privileged-answer teacher promp...
| Authors | Xiaogeng Liu, Xinyan Wang, Yingzi Ma et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 20 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 May 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.