Teacher-Student Learning

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7 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

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CAST: Non-Privileged Clipped Asymmetric Self-Teaching with Advantage Flipping for GRPO
May 29, 2026Yang Li, Gongle Xue, Yijia Guo +3RL for Language Model Reasoning Group Relative Policy Optimization
School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University, Beijing · School of Artificial Intelligence, Peking University, Beijing · School of Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing +1
Student Capacity Moderates Knowledge Distillation Effectiveness: A Systematic Study Across ResNet Teacher-Student Pairs on CIFAR-10
May 29, 2026Umut Onur YasarTeacher-Student Learning Feature-Based Knowledge Distillation
Trust-Region Behavior Blending for On-Policy Distillation
May 29, 2026Daniil Plyusov, Alexey Gorbatovski, Alexey Malakhov +4Language Model Distillation Trust-Region Optimization
T-Tech
Your Teacher Can't Help You Here: Combating Supervision Fidelity Decay in On-Policy Distillation
May 29, 2026Yanjiang Liu, Jie Lou, Xinyan Guan +7CoT Distillation Language Model Distillation
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · 2Chinese Information Processing Laboratory Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences 2University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · 3Xiaohongshu
LARK: Learnability-Grounded Trajectory Selection for Efficient Reasoning Distillation
May 28, 2026Tianrun Yu, Kaixiang Zhao, Chih-Chun Chen +5CoT Distillation Language Model Distillation
Brigham Young University · The Pennsylvania State University · University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Bounded Behavioral Indistinguishability for Black-Box LLM Distillation
May 28, 2026Munawar HasanLLM Evaluation Language Model Distillation
Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA
Same Evidence, Different Answers: Canonical-Context On-Policy Distillation for Multi-Turn Language Models
May 28, 2026Zizhuo Lin, Quanling Liu, Jinsheng Quan +6LLM Grounding Reasoning Consistency in Language Models
Zhejiang University · University of Science and Technology of China
AgentSchool: An LLM-Powered Multi-Agent Simulation for Education
May 28, 2026Yulei Ye, Wenhao Li, Zhong Wen +23Multi-Agent LLM Systems Human Behavior Simulation
Shanghai Institute of AI for Education, East China Normal University · School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University · School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University +3
Surfacing Isolated Learners with Outcome-Independent Mediation of Feedback between Teachers and Students Using AI
May 28, 2026Junsoo Park, Youssef Medhat, Htet Phyo Wai +2Explainable Artificial Intelligence AI in Education
Georgia Institute Of Technology, North Avenue, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA
Skill-Conditioned Gated Self-Distillation for LLM Reasoning
May 27, 2026Jiazhen Huang, Xiao Chen, Xiao Luo +3Mathematical Reasoning Self-Distillation
Tsinghua University · University of Wisconsin-Madison · X-Humanoid +2
ADWIN: Adaptive Windows for Horizon-Aware On-Policy Distillation
May 27, 2026Kun Liang, Chenming Tang, Clive Bai +3Language Model Distillation On-Policy Distillation
School of Computer Science, Peking University · 2National Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, Peking University · 3LLM Department, Tencent
Teacher-Student Representational Alignment for Reinforcement Learning-Driven Imitation Learning
May 27, 2026Meraj Mammadov, Pedro Zuidberg Dos Martires, Johannes Andreas StorkImitation Learning Robot Imitation Learning
Department of Computer Science Örebro University
Better Accuracies, Worse Reasoning: A Step-Level Audit of Medical Chain-of-Thought Distillation
May 27, 2026Zhaoyang Jiang, Xuanqi Peng, Fei Teng +5CoT Distillation CoT Evaluation
School of Health & Wellbeing, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK · Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Shanghai Sixth People’s Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China · School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China +1
Counteraction-Aware Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation for General Capability Recovery with Domain Preservation
May 26, 2026Tianlei Chen, Jiao Ou, Ziyuan Liu +3Language Model Distillation Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation
Kuaishou Technology, Beijing, China
Less is More: Early Stopping Rollout for On-Policy Distillation
May 26, 2026Zhou Ziheng, Jiaqi Li, Huacong Tang +2Language Model Distillation On-Policy Distillation
University of California, Los Angeles · Beijing Institute of General Artificial Intelligence
When the Strongest Teacher Is Not the Best Teacher: Student-Centric Answer Selection
May 26, 2026Zhengyu Hu, Zheyuan Xiao, Linxin Song +10Language Model Distillation LLM Post-Training
University of Washington · University of Texas at Austin · University of Southern California +6
Not All Disagreement Is Learnable: Token Teachability in On-Policy Distillation
May 26, 2026Yuanyi Wang, Su Lu, Yanggan Gu +6Selective Knowledge Distillation Language Model Distillation
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, PolyU · Hong Kong Polytechnic University Daya Bay Technology and Innovation Research Institute
On-Policy Adversarial Flow Distillation for Autoregressive Video Generation
May 25, 2026Yang Luo, Shengju Qian, Xiaohang Tang +4Autoregressive Video Generation On-Policy Distillation
National Univesity of Singapore · LIGHTSPEED · University College London
Found in Conversation: LLMs Teach Themselves to Close the Multi-Turn Gap
May 23, 2026Tianlang Chen, Shirley Wu, Jure LeskovecLanguage Model Distillation Teacher-Student Learning
Stanford
Strong Teacher Not Needed? On Distillation in LLM Pretraining
May 22, 2026Taiming Lu, Zhuang LiuLanguage Model Pretraining Language Model Distillation
Princeton University
Learning Through Noise: Why Subliminal Learning Works and When It Fails
May 22, 2026Vincent C. Brockers, Roman D. Ventzke, Valentin Neuhaus +2Subliminal Learning Cross-Architecture Knowledge Distillation
Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen · Faculty of Physics, Institute for the Dynamics of Complex Systems, University of Göttingen
EDGE-OPD: Internalizing Privileged Context with Evidence Guided On-Policy Distillation
May 22, 2026Aristotelis Lazaridis, Dylan Bates, Aman Sharma +3On-Policy Self-Distillation On-Policy Distillation
EdgeRunner AI
Coupled Training with Privileged Information and Unlabeled Data
May 22, 2026Jiahao Shi, Omar Hagrass, Jason M. KlusowskiLearning Using Privileged Information Semi-Supervised Learning
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University · Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Princeton University
A Boundary-Layer Mechanism for One-Third Scaling in Online Softmax Classification
May 21, 2026Marcel Kühn, Yoon Thelge, Bernd RosenowStatistical Physics of Learning Multiclass Classification
Institute for Theoretical Physics, Leipzig University · 2ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig
Tailoring Teaching to Aptitude: Direction-Adaptive Self-Distillation for LLM Reasoning
May 21, 2026Hongbin Zhang, Chaozheng Wang, Kehai Chen +4On-Policy Self-Distillation Mathematical Reasoning
Institute of Computing and Intelligence, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China · Keeta AI, Meituan, Beijing, China · Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China
Toward Understanding Adversarial Distillation: Why Robust Teachers Fail
May 21, 2026Hongsin Lee, Hye Won ChungAdversarial Training Neural Network Robustness
School of Electrical Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon, Korea.
Visual-Advantage On-Policy Distillation for Vision-Language Models
May 21, 2026Ruiqi Liu, Xiaolei Lv, Gengsheng Li +8Vision-Language Models VLM Distillation
Institute of Automation, CAS · School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, UCAS · 3Hello +1
X-Token: Projection-Guided Cross-Tokenizer Knowledge Distillation
May 20, 2026Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Adithyakrishna Venkatesh Hanasoge, Mingyu Yang +4Cross-Tokenizer Knowledge Distillation Language Model Distillation
When Are Teacher Tokens Reliable? Position-Weighted On-Policy Self-Distillation for Reasoning
May 20, 2026Xiaogeng Liu, Xinyan Wang, Yingzi Ma +2CoT Distillation On-Policy Self-Distillation
1Johns Hopkins University · University of Wisconsin–Madison · 3Nanyang Technological University
AVSD: Adaptive-View Self-Distillation by Balancing Consensus and Teacher-Specific Privileged Signals
May 20, 2026Duy Nguyen, Hanqi Xiao, Archiki Prasad +7On-Policy Self-Distillation Language Model Distillation
UNC Chapel Hill · Capital One · The University of Texas at Austin
Consistently Informative Soft-Label Temperature for Knowledge Distillation
May 19, 2026Hoang-Chau Luong, Nghia Van Vo, Kaiqi Zhao +1Teacher-Student Learning Knowledge Distillation
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA · Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA
LIFT and PLACE: A Simple, Stable, and Effective Knowledge Distillation Framework for Lightweight Diffusion Models
May 19, 2026Hyunsoo Han, Sangyeop Yeo, Jaejun YooModel Compression Diffusion Model Distillation
Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST)
Pocket Foundation Models: Distilling TFMs into CPU-Ready Gradient-Boosted Trees
May 18, 2026Aditya Tanna, Nassim Bouarour, Mohamed Bouadi +2Tabular Foundation Models Gradient-Boosted Decision Trees
Lexsi Labs
HEED: Density-Weighted Residual Alignment for Hybrid Vision-Language Model Distillation
May 16, 2026Yihao Liang, Niraj K. JhaCross-Modal Knowledge Distillation Efficient VLM Inference
Princeton University
Decoupling KL and Trajectories: A Unified Perspective for SFT, DAgger, Offline RL, and OPD in LLM Distillation
May 16, 2026Anhao Zhao, Haoran Xin, Yingqi Fan +3Reasoning Distillation On-Policy Distillation
Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo · Thrust of Artificial Intelligence, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +1
PopuLoRA: Co-Evolving LLM Populations for Reasoning Self-Play
May 16, 2026Roger Creus Castanyer, Geoffrey Bradway, Lorenz Wolf +3Self-Play RL RL for Language Model Reasoning
Vmax
How to Choose Your Teacher for Fine Grained Image Recognition
May 15, 2026Oswin Gosal, Edwin Arkel Rios, Augusto Christian Surya +3Fine-Grained Image Classification Teacher-Student Learning
National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan · National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
DeltaPrompts: Escaping the Zero-Delta Trap in Multimodal Distillation
May 15, 2026Jaehun Jung, Hyunwoo Kim, Brandon Cui +4VLM Distillation VLM Reasoning
NVIDIA Research
Distribution Corrected Offline Data Distillation for Large Language Models
May 13, 2026Yumeng Zhang, Zhengbang Yang, Yevin Nikhel Goonatilake +1CoT Distillation Efficient Language Model Reasoning
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
Prefix Teach, Suffix Fade: Local Teachability Collapse in Strong-to-Weak On-Policy Distillation
May 13, 2026Kaiyuan Liu, Ziyuan Zhuang, Yang Bai +3Selective Knowledge Distillation Language Model Distillation
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University · Meituan LongCat Team, China · College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University
Teaching and Learning under Deductive Errors
May 13, 2026Jan Arne Telle, Brigt Håvardstun, Jose Hernandez-OralloParameterized Complexity PAC Learning
Department of Informatics University of Bergen Norway · VRAIN - Universitat Politecnica de Valencia Spain · Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence - University of Cambridge United Kingdom
On the Generalization of Knowledge Distillation: An Information-Theoretic View
May 13, 2026Bingying Li, Haiyun HeInformation-Theoretic Generalization Bounds Statistical Learning Theory
Internet of Things Thrust, Information Hub The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) Guangzhou, China
Multi-Rollout On-Policy Distillation via Peer Successes and Failures
May 12, 2026Weichen Yu, Xiaomin Li, Yizhou Zhao +8RL for Language Model Reasoning Language Model Distillation
1Carnegie Mellon University · 2Microsoft · 3Purdue University
Beyond GRPO and On-Policy Distillation: An Empirical Sparse-to-Dense Reward Principle for Language-Model Post-Training
May 12, 2026Yuanda Xu, Hejian Sang, Zhengze Zhou +3Reinforcement Learning RL for Language Model Reasoning
Anti-Self-Distillation for Reasoning RL via Pointwise Mutual Information
May 12, 2026Guobin Shen, Xiang Cheng, Chenxiao Zhao +4On-Policy Self-Distillation RL for Language Model Reasoning
1Xiaohongshu Inc. · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Adaptive Teacher Exposure for Self-Distillation in LLM Reasoning
May 12, 2026Zihao Han, Tiangang Zhang, Huaibin Wang +1On-Policy Self-Distillation RL for Language Model Reasoning
ByteDance Douyin
Physics-Informed Teacher-Student Ensemble Learning for Traffic State Estimation with a Varying Speed Limit Scenario
May 11, 2026Archie J. Huang, Dongdong Wang, Shaurya Agarwal +3Ensemble Learning Traffic Flow Estimation
Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada · Urban Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA · Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering, University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA
The Many Faces of On-Policy Distillation: Pitfalls, Mechanisms, and Fixes
May 11, 2026Siqi Zhu, Xuyan Ye, Hongyu Lu +2On-Policy Self-Distillation On-Policy Distillation
1UIUC · 2Renmin University of China · †Work done during an internship at UIUC. +1
Unmasking On-Policy Distillation: Where It Helps, Where It Hurts, and Why
May 11, 2026Mohammadreza Armandpour, Fatih Ilhan, David Harrison +6On-Policy Self-Distillation Language Model Distillation
Apple
SplitFed-CL: A Split Federated Co-Learning Framework for Medical Image Segmentation with Inaccurate Labels
May 11, 2026Zahra Hafezi Kafshgari, Hadi Hadizadeh, Parvaneh SaeediSplit Federated Learning Noisy-Label Learning
School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Rebellious Student: Reversing Teacher Signals for Reasoning Exploration with Self-Distilled RLVR
May 11, 2026Jeonghye Kim, Jiwon Jeon, Dongsheng Li +1RL for Language Model Reasoning Language Model Distillation
Microsoft Research · KAIST
Sharp feature-learning transitions and Bayes-optimal neural scaling laws in extensive-width networks
May 11, 2026Minh-Toan Nguyen, Jean BarbierNeural Network Generalization Hierarchical Representation Learning
ICTP Trieste, Italy
STEPS: Selective On-Policy Self-Distillation for Reasoning
May 11, 2026Jiaxuan Wang, Xuan Ouyang, Zhiyu Chen +2On-Policy Self-Distillation RL for Language Model Reasoning
State Key Laboratory of Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University · School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University · AMAP, Alibaba Group +2
On-Policy Distillation with Best-of-N Teacher Rollout Selection
May 10, 2026Ke Zhang, Yunjie Tian, Dongdi Zhao +4CoT Distillation Best-of-N Sampling
Johns Hopkins University · TikTok · University of California, San Diego +1
Cornerstones or Stumbling Blocks? Deciphering the Rock Tokens in On-Policy Distillation
May 10, 2026Yuxuan Jiang, Runchao Li, Shubhashis Roy Dipta +2Language Model Distillation On-Policy Distillation
University of Maryland, Baltimore County · Case Western Reserve University · Arizona State University +1
The Extrapolation Cliff in On-Policy Distillation of Near-Deterministic Structured Outputs
May 9, 2026Xin Li, Hao Jiang, Annan Wang +2On-Policy Distillation Structured Output Generation
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Trajectory as the Teacher: Few-Step Discrete Flow Matching via Energy-Navigated Distillation
May 8, 2026Amin Karimi Monsefi, Dominic Culver, Nikhil Bhendawade +3Flow Matching Diffusion Language Model Inference
1The Ohio State University · 2Apple
KL for a KL: On-Policy Distillation with Control Variate Baseline
May 8, 2026Minjae Oh, Sangjun Song, Gyubin Choi +2Language Model Distillation Policy Gradient Methods
Graduate School of Data Science Seoul National University
Prune-OPD: Efficient and Reliable On-Policy Distillation for Long-Horizon Reasoning
May 8, 2026Zhicheng Yang, Zhijiang Guo, Yifan Song +5RL for Language Model Reasoning Language Model Distillation
1The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · 2The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · 3MBZUAI +2
SimCT: Recovering Lost Supervision for Cross-Tokenizer On-Policy Distillation
May 8, 2026Jie Sun, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song +6Cross-Tokenizer Knowledge Distillation Language Model Distillation
University of Science and Technology of China · Shanghai Innovation Institute · Large Language Model Department, Tencent +1

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CAST: Non-Privileged Clipped Asymmetric Self-Teaching with Advantage Flipping for GRPO

Yang Li, Gongle Xue, Yijia Guo, Yuheng Yuan+2

School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University, Beijing · School of Artificial Intelligence, Peking University, Beijing · School of Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing+1

RL for Language Model Reasoning Group Relative Policy Optimization Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards On-Policy Distillation Teacher-Student Learning

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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.

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