Better Starts, Better Ends: Bootstrapped Iterative Self-Reasoning Distillation for Compressed Reasoning
Large reasoning models often solve problems through long chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, yet much of this computation is spent on redundant derivations, repeated self-verification, and detours that do not improve the final answer. Existing on-policy self-distillation methods reduce this cost by matching a student model to a concise copy of itself on prefixes sampled from the student's own rollouts. We show that this objective has an initialization bottleneck. Since supervision is applied only to visited prefixes, training from a verbose base model places the KL loss on contexts that are often noisy, redundant, or already off track. In such regions, a concise teacher can provide only local ...
| Authors | Leichao Dong, Dongxu Zhang, Yiding Sun et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 17 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 July 2026 |
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