用奖励正则化改进自蒸馏,让模型自我学习更稳定、更高效。
Preference-Based Self-Distillation: Beyond KL Matching via Reward Regularization

- 通过奖励正则化替代固定教师的KL匹配,动态优化目标分布。
- 在多尺度模型上表现优于基线,数学推理与工具使用任务平均性能最佳。
- 适合追求训练稳定性和效率的模型优化研究者使用。
在策略自蒸馏中,模型在不同提示上下文中同时充当教师和学生,但现有方法主要依赖于固定教师的KL散度匹配,导致训练不稳定且推理能力随时间下降。此外,缺乏外部教师带来的探索多样性。为此,我们提出偏好型自蒸馏(PBSD),从奖励正则化视角重构自蒸馏框架。不直接匹配教师分布,而是构建一个奖励加权的教师分布作为目标,理论上可获得比原教师更优的策略。实践中,PBSD优化教师与学生样本间的偏好差距,同时保持在线策略采样。我们提供了统计分析,形式化证明了在何种条件下自蒸馏优于使用外部教师。在多个模型规模下的数学推理与工具使用基准测试中,PBSD始终取得最强平均性能,相比先前自蒸馏方法显著提升训练稳定性,且维持令牌级效率。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
On-policy distillation is an efficient alternative to reinforcement learning, offering dense token-level training signals. However, its reliance on a stronger external teacher has driven recent work on on-policy self-distillation, where the same model serves as both teacher and student under different prompt contexts. Yet, existing self-distillation methods largely reduce learning to KL matching toward the context-augmented teacher model. This approach often suffers from training instability and can degrade reasoning performance over time. Moreover, self-distillation from the same model with prompt augmentation lacks the exploratory diversity provided by a genuine external teacher. To address these limitations, we move beyond fixed-teacher KL matching and propose \textbf{P}reference-\textbf{B}ased \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{D}istillation (\textbf{PBSD}), which revisits on-policy self-distillation through a reward-regularized perspective. Instead of directly matching the teacher distribution, we derive a reward-regularized objective whose analytic optimum is a reward-reweighted teacher distribution, yielding a target policy provably superior to the original teacher under this objective. Practically, PBSD optimizes preference gaps between teacher and student samples while maintaining on-policy student sampling. We support this framework with a statistical analysis of the induced preference-learning problem, formally establishing when on policy self-distillation is preferable to learning from an external teacher in our setting. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and tool-use benchmarks across multiple model scales demonstrate that PBSD consistently achieves the strongest average performance among comparable baselines, showing improved training stability over prior self-distillation baselines while preserving token efficiency.
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