aiqbench analysis
The paper proposes WISD, a training method that improves reasoning models without an external or privileged teacher. It builds a deliberately weakened copy of the model through quantization or pruning and trains on the contrast between the two. The reported gains are notable, but they come from a work-in-progress arXiv preprint evaluated on a few math and coding benchmarks, so readers should wait for independent replication across more models and tasks.
Weaken to Strengthen: Weakening-Induced On-Policy Self-Distillation for Large Reasoning Models
arXiv:2610.38681v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation offers a way to improve reasoning models when a suitable external teacher is unavailable. However, common approaches rely on privileged information to construct a stronger self-teacher, limiting their use when only unlabeled prompts are available. In this paper, we introduce Weakening-Induced On-Policy Self-Distillation (WISD), which instead constructs a weaker counterpart of the original model and uses the contrast between the two as a training signal without requiring privileged information. We explore two ways to construct the weaker model: low-bit quantization and magnitude pruning. We evaluate WISD across diverse architectures and scales on mathematical and coding reasoning tasks. Across these benchmarks, quantization and pruning improve average accuracy over the original models by 4.0 and 5.5 percentage points, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art performance even without privileged information. Notably, pruning raises Qwen3.5-4B's accuracy from 57.7% to 70.5% on HMMT 2025 and from 39.1% to 56.7% on LiveCodeBench v6. Quantization raises Qwen3.6-35B-A3B's accuracy from 68.5% to 74.6% and from 61.8% to 69.5% on the same benchmarks, respectively. These results establish WISD as a novel and effective self-distillation framework for large reasoning models.
Abstract:Self-distillation offers a way to improve reasoning models when a suitable external teacher is unavailable. However, common approaches rely on privileged information to construct a stronger self-teacher, limiting their use when only unlabeled prompts are available. In this paper, we introduce Weakening-Induced On-Policy Self-Distillation (WISD), which instead constructs a weaker counterpart of the original model and uses the contrast between the two as a training signal without requiring privileged information. We explore two ways to construct the weaker model: low-bit quantization and magnitude pruning. We evaluate WISD across diverse architectures and scales on mathematical and coding reasoning tasks. Across these benchmarks, quantization and pruning improve average accuracy over the original models by 4.0 and 5.5 percentage points, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art performance even without privileged information. Notably, pruning raises Qwen3.5-4B's accuracy from 57.7% to 70.5% on HMMT 2025 and from 39.1% to 56.7% on LiveCodeBench v6. Quantization raises Qwen3.6-35B-A3B's accuracy from 68.5% to 74.6% and from 61.8% to 69.5% on the same benchmarks, respectively. These results establish WISD as a novel and effective self-distillation framework for large reasoning models.
Work in progress. Code is released at this https URL
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2610.38681 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2610.38681v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.38681 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 287 words