Impact of Privileged Information on On-Policy Self-Distillation
September 16, 2026
Using the AMPLE-Math suite, this study finds that reference-free distillation contributes most to performance gains in reasoning models like Qwen3-1.7B. The benefit of providing a teacher model with extra 'privileged' information or worked solutions is found to be relatively modest.
HOW THIS AFFECTS YOU
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researcherThis clarifies where to focus distillation efforts—on the distillation process itself rather than just enriching teacher prompts.