Visual Contrastive Self-Distillation
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) removes the external teacher required by on-policy distillation (OPD), but still needs asymmetric information between teacher and student so that the self-teacher provides a stronger learning signal. Existing methods create this asymmetry through privileged answers or visual evidence. We ask whether both can be removed, yielding a simpler form of OPSD driven purely by input conditioning. We propose Visual Contrastive Self-Distillation, namely VCSD, which converts image-content removal into an on-policy self-distillation signal. At each student-generated response prefix, the EMA teacher produces two next-token distributions under the same prompt and prefi...
| Authors | Yijun Liang, Yunjie Tian, Yijiang Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 23 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 October 2026 |
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