Distill Skills into Weights, Not Prompts: Abstract Skills as Privileged Signals for On-Policy Self-Distillation
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards yields no group-relative signal when rollout groups are uniformly correct or uniformly wrong, which account for 63.0-68.0% of groups in our experiments. We propose SKALD (Skill-Anchored Latent Distillation), an on-policy self-distillation framework that uses two context views of the same Qwen3-Base model: a question-only student and a teacher conditioned on an abstract, explicit-answer-filtered skill card. The student is trained on its own prefixes, transferring the skill-induced advantage into shared parameters without privileged input at test time. To stabilize context-induced distribution mismatch, SKALD employs an annealed exponentially t...
| Authors | Yubo Jiang, Fengying Xie, Zhiguo Jiang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 10 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 August 2026 |
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