Why Does Self-Distillation (Sometimes) Degrade the Reasoning Capability of LLMs?
Jeonghye KimXufang LuoMinbeom KimSangmook LeeDohyung KimJiwon JeonDongsheng LiYuqing Yang
Aug 2026
Machine LearningNatural Language Processing
Abstract
Self-distillation has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for LLMs, often improving performance while shortening reasoning traces. However, in mathematical reasoning, we find that it can reduce response length while degrading performance. We trace this degradation to the suppression of epistemic verbalization - the model's expression of uncertainty during reasoning. Through controlled experiments varying conditioning context richness and task coverage, we show that conditioning the teacher on rich information suppresses uncertainty expression, enabling rapid in-domain optimization with limited task coverage but harming OOD performance, where unseen problems benefit from expressing uncertainty and adjusting accordingly. Across Qwen3-1.7B/8B, DeepSeek-Distill-Qwen-7B, and Olmo3-7B-Instruct, we observe performance drops of up to 40%. Our findings highlight that exposing appropriate levels of uncertainty is crucial for robust reasoning and underscore the importance of optimizing reasoning behavior beyond merely reinforcing correct answer traces.
This work introduces a pioneering exploration of Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) within the SNN, and proposes a novel Spiking Self-Attention (SSA) and Spiking Transformer (Spikformer) that achieves 80+% accuracy on ImageNet.
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EquiPocket is proposed, an E(3)-equivariant Graph Neural Network for binding site prediction, which comprises three modules: the first one to extract local geometric information for each surface atom, the second one to model both the chemical and spatial structure of protein and the last one to capture the geometry of the surface via equivariant message passing over the surface atoms.
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It is shown that the maximum hypergraph density of any multiclass hypothesis class is upper-bounded by its DS dimension, which proves a longstanding conjecture of Daniely and Shalev-Shwartz (2014) and determines the optimal dependence of the sample complexity on the DS dimension for multiclass as well as list learning.
Quantum measurements are the means by which we recover messages encoded into quantum states. They are at the forefront of quantum hypothesis testing, wherein the goal is to perform an optimal measurement for arriving at a correct conclusion. Mathematically, a measurement operator is Hermitian with eigenvalues in [0,1]. By noticing that this constraint on each eigenvalue is the same as that imposed on fermions by the Pauli exclusion principle, we interpret every eigenmode of a measurement operator as an independent effective fermionic mode. Under this perspective, various objective functions in quantum hypothesis testing can be viewed as the total expected energy associated with these fermionic occupation numbers. By instead fixing a temperature and minimizing the total expected fermionic free energy, we find that optimal measurements for these modified objective functions are Fermi-Dirac thermal measurements, wherein their eigenvalues are specified by Fermi-Dirac distributions. In the low-temperature limit, their performance closely approximates that of optimal measurements for quantum hypothesis testing, and we show that their parameters can be learned by classical or hybrid quantum-classical optimization algorithms. This leads to a new quantum machine-learning model, termed Fermi-Dirac machines, consisting of parameterized Fermi-Dirac thermal measurements-an alternative to quantum Boltzmann machines based on thermal states. Beyond hypothesis testing, we show how general semidefinite optimization problems can be solved using this approach, leading to a novel paradigm for semidefinite optimization on quantum computers, in which the goal is to implement thermal measurements rather than prepare thermal states. Finally, we propose quantum algorithms for implementing Fermi-Dirac thermal measurements, and we also propose second-order hybrid quantum-classical optimization algorithms.
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New MIT research could lead to better materials for a fossil-fuel-free process for making the chemical that's essential to fertilizer and other products.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduAug 18, 2026
A new method for surgically removing training examples from a model reveals that as datasets grow, the link between what a model learns and what it produces dissolves.
