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This research investigates the failure of Feedback-Augmented Self-Distillation in agentic search tasks, identifying a "decoding collapse" where models rely on repetitive output templates that render self-distillation signals uninformative. The authors demonstrate that inconsistent supervision from prompts and model states destabilizes learning but can be mitigated by introducing an Exponential Moving Average (EMA) teacher for more stable training dynamics.
Why Does Feedback-Augmented Self-Distillation Fail to Improve Retrieval-Interleaved Search Agents?
arXiv:2607.17558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) offers a promising approach for training large language models without relying on a separate teacher model. However, its effectiveness on complex agentic tasks remains largely unexplored. In this work, we instantiate Feedback-Augmented Self-Distillation (FA-SD), a self-distillation algorithm for agentic search that leverages successful demonstrations as privileged information. We identify that models can rely on recurring reasoning-and-search output templates, producing trajectories that appear diverse but are largely agnostic to the input question, making the KL-based self-distillation signal uninformative. We term this phenomenon decoding collapse, a failure mode that can be missed by existing evaluation metrics. To understand its underlying cause, we show that although the self-teacher achieves stronger performance, learning remains inherently unstable due to inconsistent supervision signals. We further decompose this inconsistency into model inconsistency and prompt inconsistency, and show that the latter can significantly degrade the quality of the supervision signal, limiting the effectiveness of self-teacher learning. To mitigate this inconsistency, we introduce an exponential moving average (EMA) teacher to stabilize the self-teacher and provide more consistent supervision signals. Although the EMA teacher requires a warm-up phase during which performance may temporarily regress, it ultimately improves model performance by providing more stable supervision.
Title:Why Does Feedback-Augmented Self-Distillation Fail to Improve Retrieval-Interleaved Search Agents?
Abstract:On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) offers a promising approach for training large language models without relying on a separate teacher model. However, its effectiveness on complex agentic tasks remains largely unexplored. In this work, we instantiate Feedback-Augmented Self-Distillation (FA-SD), a self-distillation algorithm for agentic search that leverages successful demonstrations as privileged information. We identify that models can rely on recurring reasoning-and-search output templates, producing trajectories that appear diverse but are largely agnostic to the input question, making the KL-based self-distillation signal uninformative. We term this phenomenon decoding collapse, a failure mode that can be missed by existing evaluation metrics. To understand its underlying cause, we show that although the self-teacher achieves stronger performance, learning remains inherently unstable due to inconsistent supervision signals. We further decompose this inconsistency into model inconsistency and prompt inconsistency, and show that the latter can significantly degrade the quality of the supervision signal, limiting the effectiveness of self-teacher learning. To mitigate this inconsistency, we introduce an exponential moving average (EMA) teacher to stabilize the self-teacher and provide more consistent supervision signals. Although the EMA teacher requires a warm-up phase during which performance may temporarily regress, it ultimately improves model performance by providing more stable supervision.
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2607.17558 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2607.17558v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.17558 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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