On-Policy Self-Distillation with Sampled Demonstrations Reduces Output Diversity

Andrei Liviu Nicolicioiu, Mohammad Pezeshki, Aaron Courville

Keywords: LLM reasoning, self-distillation, diversity, reasoning, mode collapse

TL;DR: Self-distillation with sampled demonstrations is less diverse than on-policy RL. The optimal policy has more bias for loss of diversity and experiments show less steep pass@k curves, meaning less diversity.

Abstract: On-policy self-distillation achieves strong pass@1 accuracy by using a single model as both teacher and student, with the teacher conditioned on a correct demonstration to provide dense token-level feedback. We show that this could come at a hidden cost: rollout diversity decrease and pass@k curves flatten (i.e., generating more rollouts fails to improve accuracy). We trace this to compounding biases in the design of self-distillation with sampled demonstrations. The teacher scores each student rollout while conditioned on a sampled correct rollout, channeling its feedback through the model's own biases. We theoretically analyze the optimal self-distillation policy and show that it tilts the base distribution by a pointwise conditional mutual information score between the student's rollout and the correct rollout used as context. Unlike the ideal optimal on-policy reinforcement learning (RL), which preserves probability ratios among equally correct rollouts, self-distillation can amplify existing probability gaps, concentrating mass on already-dominant modes. On a controlled graph path-finding task and science question-answering benchmarks, self-distilled confirms this pattern: competitive average performance but substantially lower functional and semantic diversity than RL models, and failure on out-of-distribution settings that require diverse strategies.

Submission Number: 135