| name | demopsd-policy-self-distillation |
| description | Disagreement-Modulated Policy Self-Distillation framework for LLM reasoning. Resolves privileged information leakage and exploration preservation in on-policy distillation via reverse-KL barycenter target, achieving leakage attenuation and exploration preservation simultaneously. |
| trigger | policy self-distillation, DemoPSD, privileged information leakage, reverse KL, knowledge distillation, LLM reasoning training |
| category | ai_collection/collection/skills |
DemoPSD: Disagreement-Modulated Policy Self-Distillation
Overview
DemoPSD is a novel on-policy self-distillation framework that resolves two fundamental problems in LLM reasoning distillation:
- Privileged information leakage: Student encodes answer-dependent shortcuts unavailable at test time
- Exploration suppression: Teacher's dense token-level supervision overfits to in-domain patterns
Core Innovation
Instead of fitting the full teacher distribution, DemoPSD steers the student toward a reverse-KL barycenter target — a weighted geometric combination of teacher and student distributions.
Key Mechanisms
- Disagreement Measurement: Measure difference between teacher and student distributions at each token position
- Adaptive Blending: Use discrepancy to adaptively control teacher-student blending per token
- Selective Adoption: Student selectively adopts teacher guidance rather than full imitation
Theoretical Guarantees
- Leakage Attenuation: Effective mitigation of privileged information leakage
- Exploration Preservation: Preserved exploration capacity under dense token-level distillation
Results
- Outperforms GRPO and SDPO on SciKnowEval across four scientific fields
- Maintains higher training entropy
- Robustly generalizes to out-of-distribution GPQA benchmarks
Implementation
teacher_dist = model(prompt, privileged=True)
student_dist = model(prompt, privileged=False)
disagreement = kl_divergence(teacher_dist, student_dist)
barycenter = geometric_mean(teacher_dist, student_dist, weight=disagreement)
loss = reverse_kl(student_dist, barycenter)
Activation Keywords
policy self-distillation, DemoPSD, privileged information leakage, reverse KL, knowledge distillation, exploration preservation
Source
arXiv: 2607.02497 (2026-07-02)