On Repulsive and Attractive Teachers: Separating Correctness from Behavior in Self-Distillation
On-policy self-distillation provides dense, token-level supervision by conditioning a model on privileged information and distilling the resulting teacher distribution back into the model. However, privileged information can change not only what the teacher knows, but also how it behaves, entangling correctness-relevant learning signals with unintended behavioral shifts. We study this effect in reasoning tasks by contrasting attractive self-distillation, which moves the model toward a privileged teacher, with repulsive self-distillation, which moves it away from a privileged teacher. We find that both objectives can induce strong and opposing behavioral shifts: attraction suppresses explo...
| Authors | Anton Baumann, Akmal Ashirmatov, Leo Schmidt-Traub et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 18 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 September 2026 |
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