ResearchResearch paperReasoning & Planning · Large Language Models · Reinforcement Learning1 source · Oct 19, 2026

Bridged Self-Distillation for On-Policy Learning

To this end, we propose Bridged Self-Distillation (BSD), a unified framework for distilling from any teacher that provides reasoning traces.

Key points

  • On-policy distillation can transfer the reasoning capabilities of a strong teacher to a smaller student.
  • However, distillation from a stronger teacher model faces two mismatches: its solutions may be difficult for a smaller student to imitate, and its token-level probabilities may be incompatible with, or even unavailable to, the student.
  • Existing methods handle these settings through different forms of supervision.
  • The model to be distilled from, termed the external teacher, first provides a reasoning trace as privileged context, which can be generated in an offline fashion.

Sources (1)

  • [1]Bridged Self-Distillation for On-Policy Learning
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 19, 01:40 PM
    To this end, we propose Bridged Self-Distillation (BSD), a unified framework for distilling from any teacher that provides reasoning traces.
    On-policy distillation can transfer the reasoning capabilities of a strong teacher to a smaller student.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.

Before this

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  6. Oct 18, 2026Beyond the Teacher: Understanding and Preserving Distillation Overshoot in Agentic On-Policy Distillation

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