Privileged Solutions or Context-Induced Teacher Behavior? Dissecting On-Policy Self-Distillation
On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) is commonly interpreted as the transfer of privileged information: a teacher observes the verified solution to the target problem and supervises the student's trajectory. However, this interpretation conflates two effects. The reference solution not only reveals the answer to the current instance but also changes the context under which the teacher provides token-level supervision. We investigate the role of target-specific privilege with $\mathrm{OP}^{2}\mathrm{SD}$ (On-Policy Self-Distillation from Other Problems), which replaces the paired reference with a problem and solution from a different example, while preserving the student rollout, teacher, an...
| Authors | Yuki Ichihara, Naoto Iwase, Mohammad Atif Quamar et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 10 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 August 2026 |
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