{"paper":{"title":"Why Does Feedback-Augmented Self-Distillation Fail to Improve Retrieval-Interleaved Search Agents?","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.AI","authors_text":"Fan Yang, Rui Meng, Yuxin Wen","submitted_at":"2026-07-20T05:07:22Z","abstract_excerpt":"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 th"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2607.17558","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/2607.17558/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"}