SMOPD: Selective Token-Entropy Masking for Dirty-History Multi-Turn On-Policy Self-Distillation

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.14647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dirty-history rollouts make multi-turn on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) brittle: once a student emits an erroneous intermediate reply, later turns are conditioned on that reply, and uniform distillation can spend loss on tokens that carry little corrective signal. We introduce SMOPD (Selective Masking for On-Policy Distillation), a loss-only stabilization method for multi-turn OPSD. For each generated middle-turn reply, SMOPD ranks token positi