{"paper":{"title":"When Should the Teacher Move? Temporal Coupling and Stability in Self On-Policy Distillation","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Baolong Bi, Bingqian Sun, Haowei Guo, Ruicheng Zhang, Wentao Zhang","submitted_at":"2026-06-02T11:54:39Z","abstract_excerpt":"Self on-policy distillation trains a student policy against a teacher derived from its own parameter history, yet the teacher's update schedule -- which governs the \\emph{temporal coupling} between teacher and student -- has not been systematically studied as a stability variable. Through a controlled schedule sweep on Qwen3-8B, we establish that \\emph{isolation periods}, defined as complete teacher freezing between updates, are the key structural property enabling stable learning, not teacher age. To characterize these underlying training dynamics, we introduce a diagnostic framework of tempo"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.03532","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.03532/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}