When Privileged Guidance Misaligns: State-Matched Routing and Contextualized Self-Distillation for Multi-Turn Agents
Multi-turn agents trained with sparse outcome rewards receive limited supervision for intermediate decisions. Privileged on-policy self-distillation provides denser guidance by having a synchronized teacher re-score student responses with training-only references. However, the student may take different actions or complete subgoals in another order, reaching states for which the reference provides no applicable continuation. The resulting state--reference mismatch can lead the reference-conditioned teacher to penalize valid actions. We introduce State-Matched Routing and Contextualized Self-Distillation (SMRC-SD), which uses the student's reached state to decide when and how a reference s...
| Authors | Junzhuo Liu, Weiwei Li, Jun Ling et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 5 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 October 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 Information may be incomplete or out of date.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.