When Clipping Reverses Correction: Failure Dynamics of Pointwise Forward-KL On-Policy Self-Distillation
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a student on its own generated responses using feedback from the same model conditioned on privileged information. On mathematical reasoning, the original OPSD study finds that stylistic tokens can dominate the training signal over math-related tokens, and that pointwise clipping of the forward KL objective stabilizes training. Pointwise clipping caps each vocabulary-wise forward KL term at a fixed threshold before summing over the vocabulary. Follow-up studies have adopted this clipping, but its effect on training has not been directly examined. In matched training runs differing only in whether clipping is applied, we observe that clipped runs p...
| Authors | Di Huang, Hao Li, Yixin Chen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 30 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 September 2026 |
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