arXiv:2607.06855cs.LGcs.CL2026-07

通过几何约束提升大模型推理泛化能力,避免自蒸馏导致的错误固化。

Geometric Self-Distillation for Reasoning Generalization

论文配图:Geometric Self-Distillation for Reasoning Generalization
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用几何距离衡量预测分布差异,动态调节教师指导强度。
  • 在数学推理任务上,相比基线模型提升5.7-8.6分的分布外性能。
  • 适用于1.7B到32B的大模型,尤其适合需要可靠推理的场景。

在策略自蒸馏中,教师与学生共享相同前缀,但教师可看到提示或完整解题轨迹,从而提供密集监督。然而这种优势带来信任问题:教师对某些延续有把握,学生却无法支撑。当师生分歧最大时,蒸馏力度最强,长期积累会导致分布外(OOD)推理性能下降。本文提出GeoSD,一种几何自蒸馏方法,将这种偏差视为学生预测行为的漂移,并从两方面应对:一是使用Hellinger损失按学生已有重叠度衰减教师偏好,抑制学生难以支持的预测;二是引入近端项,以Fisher-Rao距离惩罚学生预测偏离近期检查点的程度。两者均基于下一个词分布的几何空间,采用自然梯度更新。在多个数学推理基准和三种模型架构上,GeoSD在保持分布内性能的同时,使平均分布外准确率提升5.7–8.6个百分点,且在1.7B至32B模型规模间均有效。分析表明,传统匹配会通过压缩高熵状态下的备选方案来强求一致,导致自信地给出错误答案,而GeoSD则保留这些备选路径。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

On-policy distillation is a practical post-training recipe for large language models, supplying dense teacher supervision on the student's own trajectories. In privileged-context self-distillation, teacher and student are the same model conditioned on the same prefix, but the teacher also sees a hint or the full solution trace. This makes supervision abundant but harder to trust: the teacher can be confident about continuations its privileged view makes obvious but the student cannot yet justify. The distillation pull is strongest where teacher and student disagree most, and over many updates it accumulates into drift that degrades out-of-distribution (OOD) reasoning. We introduce GeoSD, a geometric self-distillation objective that treats this drift as movement in the student's predictive behavior and counters it in two complementary ways. A Hellinger loss scales each teacher preference by the overlap the student already shares with it, attenuating the pull on tokens the student cannot yet support. Since these pulls still compound over training, a proximal term penalizes how far the student's predictions drift from a recent checkpoint, measured as a Fisher-Rao distance. Both are distances in the same geometry of next-token distributions, and a natural-gradient update takes its steps in that geometry rather than in parameter space. Across mathematical reasoning benchmarks and three model families, GeoSD preserves the in-distribution gains of self-distillation while improving average OOD accuracy by 5.7-8.6 points over the base model, with gains holding across model scales from 1.7B to 32B. Analyzing why standard matching fails out of distribution, we find it wins agreement with the teacher by draining mass from alternatives at high-entropy states, resulting in confident agreement on wrong answers, whereas GeoSD keeps those alternatives in reach.

自蒸馏推理泛化大模型

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