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Learning by distilling context

28 Pith papers cite this work, alongside 7 external citations. Polarity classification is still indexing.

28 Pith papers citing it
7 external citations · Pith
abstract

Language models significantly benefit from context tokens, such as prompts or scratchpads. They perform better when prompted with informative instructions, and they acquire new reasoning capabilities by generating a scratch-pad before predicting the final answers. However, they do not \textit{internalize} these performance gains, which disappear when the context tokens are gone. Our work proposes to apply context distillation so that a language model can improve itself by internalizing these gains. Concretely, given a synthetic unlabeled input for the target task, we condition the model on ``[instructions] + [task-input]'' to predict ``[scratch-pad] + [final answer]''; then we fine-tune the same model to predict its own ``[final answer]'' conditioned on the ``[task-input]'', without seeing the ``[instructions]'' or using the ``[scratch-pad]''. We show that context distillation is a general method to train language models, and it can effectively internalize 3 types of training signals. First, it can internalize abstract task instructions and explanations, so we can iteratively update the model parameters with new instructions and overwrite old ones. Second, it can internalize step-by-step reasoning for complex tasks (e.g., 8-digit addition), and such a newly acquired capability proves to be useful for other downstream tasks. Finally, it can internalize concrete training examples, and it outperforms directly learning with gradient descent by 9\% on the SPIDER Text-to-SQL dataset; furthermore, combining context distillation operations can internalize more training examples than the context window size allows.

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representative citing papers

Near-Future Policy Optimization

cs.LG · 2026-04-22 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

NPO uses a policy's own near-future checkpoint as auxiliary trajectories to maximize effective learning signal S = Q/V, improving performance from 57.88 to 63.15 on Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct with GRPO while accelerating convergence.

Context Memorization for Efficient Long Context Generation

cs.CL · 2026-05-18 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Attention-state memory externalizes long prefixes into a lightweight lookup table of precomputed attention states, yielding higher accuracy than standard in-context learning at fixed memory budgets and lower latency than full attention.

Self-Supervised On-Policy Distillation for Reasoning Language Models

cs.LG · 2026-05-17 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

SSOPD converts intra-group correct-wrong contrast into process supervision by distilling a teacher distribution from the shortest correct completion into prefixes of the longest wrong completion, improving GRPO on AIME and HMMT benchmarks.

Large Language Models Can Self-Improve

cs.CL · 2022-10-20 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

A 540B-parameter LLM improves reasoning performance on GSM8K, DROP, OpenBookQA, and ANLI-A3 by fine-tuning on self-generated high-confidence CoT solutions from unlabeled data.

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Showing 28 of 28 citing papers.