VISTA: Verifier-Informed Student-to-Teacher Adaptation for On-Policy Self-Distillation
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves reasoning by training a problem-only student on its own rollouts using dense token-level supervision from a privileged teacher that also sees a reference solution. However, standard OPSD treats the teacher distribution as a fixed target along the student's rollout and updates only the student %, although -- even though privileged conditioning does not guarantee that the teacher always provides the most appropriate target for problem-only reasoning. This one-way supervision can therefore misdirect the student when the teacher distribution is misaligned with valid student reasoning. We therefore introduce Verifier-Informed Student-to-Teacher Adapt...
| Authors | Zewen Ding, Zezhong Wu, Zhou Tao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 28 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 August 2026 |
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