Diagnosing and Mitigating Thinking Collapse in On-Policy Self-Distillation

Jul 14, 2026

Researchers have identified 'Thinking Collapse,' a failure mode in on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) for large language models, where intermediate reasoning abilities degrade during training. They introduce Adaptive Dual-Perspective OPSD (AD-OPSD), a method that dynamically moderates the self-distillation objective to preserve reasoning capacity. Experiments show that AD-OPSD improves accuracy by up to 4.1% on mathematical benchmarks compared to standard OPSD.

Why it matters: This work addresses a critical limitation in a widely used LLM training technique, potentially leading to more reliable reasoning in complex tasks.

Full story at: arXiv Computation and Language ↗