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On Repulsive and Attractive Teachers: Separating Correctness from Behavior in Self-Distillation

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 18, 2026 · UTC

On-policy self-distillation provides dense, token-level supervision by conditioning a model on privileged information and distilling the resulting teacher distribution back into the model. However, privileged information can change not only what the teacher knows, but also how it behaves, entangling correctness-relevant learning signals with unintended behavioral shifts. We study this effect in reasoning tasks by contrasting attractive self-distillation, which moves the model toward a privileged teacher, with repulsive self-distillation, which moves it away from a privileged teacher. We find t

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First collected: 2026-09-23T13:51:27.104Z. This is not the publication date.