Not Every Rollout Needs Distillation: Correctness-Filtered On-Policy Self-Distillation
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) supervises student-generated trajectories with a reference-conditioned version of the same base model. We ask whether every trajectory supplies distinct supervision that warrants its distillation cost. Gradient measurements on Qwen3-1.7B at initialization reveal that correct and incorrect responses have similar individual gradient magnitudes, but incorrect responses have approximately three times the coherent gradient share. Their estimated population-mean directions also largely overlap. A signal--noise model fitted at a small group size tracks alignment at larger group sizes without refitting. Motivated by these measurements, we introduce correctness-f...
| Authors | Harrison Zhao, Lei Huang, Fei Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
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