CAST: Non-Privileged Clipped Asymmetric Self-Teaching with Advantage Flipping for GRPO
Authors: Yang Li, Gongle Xue, Yijia Guo, Yuheng Yuan, Liwen Hu, Lei Ma
Organizations: School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University, Beijing · School of Artificial Intelligence, Peking University, Beijing · School of Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing · School of Future Technology, Peking University, Beijing
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), especially Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has been widely used to improve reasoning in large language models. However, outcome-level rewards provide only sparse supervision, and group-relative advantages vanish when all sampled trajectories for a prompt are either correct or incorrect. On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) offers dense token-level guidance, but its token preferences are not necessarily aligned with trajectory correctness; empirical diagnostics show that OPSD signals behave differently on correct and incorrect rollouts, with teacher-positive and teacher-negative gap signals exhibiting different noise profiles. These diagnostics are conducted under an OPSD-style privileged teacher context for analysis only, whereas CAST training uses answer-free self-teacher scoring.Motivated by these observations, this work proposes CAST, an answer-free self-distillation method for GRPO-style RLVR. CAST keeps the verifier-grounded GRPO objective, but uses a stop-gradient self-teacher to shape token-level advantages according to trajectory correctness. Unlike prior self-distilled RLVR methods, CAST does not require reference-solution-conditioned teacher scoring, keeps the self-teacher log-probability gap active throughout training, and applies bidirectional local advantage sign reversal: teacher-negative tokens in correct trajectories can receive negative token-level advantages, while teacher-positive tokens in incorrect trajectories can receive bounded positive local advantages. For zero-variance all-correct and all-wrong groups, CAST assigns bounded sign-constrained base advantages, so these otherwise zero-gradient groups can contribute verifier-signed token feedback. Experiments on mathematical reasoning show that CAST improves RLVR training while retaining a lightweight, verifier-grounded trajectory-level objective.
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in training LLMs for reasoning tasks, but representative methods such as GRPO assign uniform credit across all tokens, wasting gradient on routine tokens while under-crediting pivotal reasoning steps. Existing token-level credit assignment methods require resources beyond the model's own rollouts. GRPO variants rely on process reward models or ground-truth answers. Knowledge distillation assigns credit through per-token divergence but requires external teachers (On-Policy Distillation) or privileged information (On-Policy Self Distillation). However, these dependencies limit applicability in the pure RLVR setting. We observe that conditioning the model on its own verified trajectories induces a measurable per-token KL divergence between the original and conditioned distributions, and prove that distilling from a self-teacher constructed by verified trajectories leads to infeasible weighted-average solutions when multiple verified trajectories exist. We propose SC-GRPO (Self-Conditioned GRPO), which uses KL divergence mentioned before as a multiplicative weight on GRPO gradients. Across five benchmarks spanning math, code, and agentic tasks, SC-GRPO consistently outperforms 8.1% over GRPO and 5.9% over DAPO with stronger OOD performance. Moreover, SC-GRPO achieves higher performance than OPD.
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs). While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely adopted, it suffers from sparse reward signals and loses gradients entirely when all responses within a group receive identical rewards. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers a natural remedy by providing dense, token-level supervision from a teacher model. However, naively combining GRPO with OPD leads to degraded performance, due to three underlying causes: not all samples benefit from distillation; fitting too quickly to the teacher undermines the exploratory capacity of RL; and OPD's advantages are asymmetric, suppressing most tokens. To address these challenges, we propose RSTG (Recovering Learning Signals via Adaptive Teacher Guidance), which applies distillation selectively and precisely where it matters most. At the sample level, OPD is restricted to negative zero-variance prompts with each sample weighted by the teacher's confidence score. At the token level, distillation targets only tokens with high student entropy or large teacher-student divergence. We further augment training with SFT on correct trajectories generated by the teacher model, injecting positive gradient signals where RL yields none. Experiments demonstrate that RSTG substantially outperforms naive GRPO+OPD by +4.02% on math and +3.05% on code.
GRPO-style RLVR trains reasoning models from multiple on-policy attempts per prompt, but typically uses these attempts only through terminal rewards. We show that a mixed group contains a richer process signal: a correct completion is a self-generated witness of how the current policy can solve the problem, while a wrong completion provides on-policy prefixes where the policy needs correction. We introduce \emph{Self-Supervised On-Policy Distillation} (SSOPD), which distills a teacher distribution conditioned on the shortest correct completion into prefixes of the longest wrong completion. This converts intra-group correct--wrong contrast into dense process supervision without external solution traces. A stopping-time view motivates the shortest-correct / longest-wrong rule as a finite-group approximation to editing persistent failures toward fast-success actions, and a prompt-level frontier weight concentrates the auxiliary loss where correct and wrong branches coexist. Across AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025, SSOPD improves over GRPO in all nine model-benchmark settings. On Qwen3-8B, it reaches a macro Avg@12 of 65.6, outperforming GRPO by 1.6 points and the solution-conditioned OPSD baseline by 0.8 points. Code will be released at https://github.com/tzq1999/SSOPD.