One Symptom, Three Levers: A Critical Review of On-Policy Self-Distillation
Score
73首次以统一框架归纳OPSD崩溃现象，补齐术语差异，但未带来新实验证据。
结构清晰，逻辑严密，聚焦数学推理领域，综述范围有界。
为从业者诊断自蒸馏崩溃提供可操作的三个杠杆，但暂无实证验证。
论文紧贴同策略自蒸馏最新研究进展，arXiv编号显示近期发布。
arXiv论文虽未经同行评审，但为批判性综述，引证体系完整。
Base 81 × T2 Source weight ×0.9 = 73
Curation line 70Selected
Why selected
This is a timely and systematic review of a hot topic, but it reports no new experiments; the source is reliable.
AI commentary
「This review elevates OPSD collapse from scattered symptoms to a system of controllable levers, especially valuable for researchers using self-distillation for reasoning models. It reports no new experiments, but provides a shared vocabulary to quickly decode the 'same disease, different names' across papers. If you want to improve your distillation pipeline, start by asking where the signal is applied, what the teacher sees, and when guidance decays.」
Quick overview
This review critically examines on-policy self-distillation (OPSD). OPSD trains a language model on its own generations, using the model itself as teacher with privileged information for token-level scoring, eliminating the need for a separate larger teacher. Early results showed accuracy comparable to reinforcement learning with far fewer generated tokens. However, the dominant failure mode is collapse: the progressive narrowing of reasoning paths, aggravated by privileged information. The paper treats collapse as a symptom governed by three levers: where the signal is applied, what the teacher is shown, and when the signal changes. Focusing on mathematical reasoning, the review reports no new experiments. Its main contribution is a shared vocabulary and a clear line between settled and disputed findings.
- OPSD uses the model itself as teacher, leveraging privileged information for token-level supervision, eliminating the cost of an extra large model.
- Early results show OPSD can achieve RL-comparable accuracy on mathematical reasoning with far fewer generated tokens.
- The dominant failure mode is collapse: the progressive narrowing of reasoning path diversity, aggravated by privileged information.
- This paper proposes three levers to understand collapse: signal weighting, the nature of privileged information, and the dynamics of teacher guidance decay.
Full text
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