ReSAIL: Mitigating Collapse in Iterative Agent Self-Distillation

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

ReSAIL 提出一种即插即用的增强方法,通过轨迹平衡选择性蒸馏与特权信息保留,缓解智能体迭代自蒸馏中的性能坍缩问题;在 ALFWorld 和 TextCraft 上使用 Qwen3-4B/8B 模型,三个部署周期后平均成功率比 SDPO/OEL 基线提升 22.5 个百分点。

Iterative self-distillation enables LLM agents to learn from successive deployments, offering a path toward recursive self-improvement (RSI). Yet our experiments with existing methods reveal a collapse in deployment performance across cycles, while task performance with privileged information (PI) also declines. We address this collapse by prioritizing informative interaction steps for distillation and preserving PI-conditioned behavior as the student becomes the next teacher. We introduce Retentive and Selective Augmentation for Iterative Self-Distillation (ReSAIL), a plug-in augmentation for iterative PI-based self-distillation. ReSAIL selects interaction steps where PI most strongly changes the teacher's predictions and balances the resulting distillation losses across trajectories. It also regularizes the student's PI-conditioned output distributions toward those of the frozen teacher at selected and unselected steps to preserve PI-conditioned behavior for supervision in the next cycle. On ALFWorld and TextCraft, ReSAIL sustains substantial gains across model scales over three cycles, with an average absolute gain of 22.5% in final-cycle success rates when added to self-distillation baselines. Sensitivity-guided selection of offline data also improves action prediction accuracy for multimodal GUI agents on AITZ. These findings provide the first evidence that a more robust learning mechanism can effectively mitigate performance collapse in iterative agent self-distillation over deployment trajectories.
Original Article
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Paper page - ReSAIL: Mitigating Collapse in Iterative Agent Self-Distillation

Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2609.39306 Can agents keep improving by distilling from their own deployment experience? In our experiments, existing self-distillation methods can lose both deployment performance and task competence with privileged information (PI) across cycles. This matters because today’s student becomes tomorrow’s teacher.

ReSAIL is a plug-in augmentation with two complementary components:

  • **Trajectory-balanced selective distillation:**prioritize interaction steps where PI most changes the teacher’s predictions, and balance the losses across trajectories.
  • **Privileged retention:**preserve the student’s PI-conditioned behavior to support supervision in the next cycle.

WithQwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B, ReSAIL sustains gains overthree deployment cyclesonALFWorld and TextCraft. At cycle 3, it improves success rates by22.5 percentage points on averageover the corresponding SDPO/OEL baselines, across two model scales and three evaluation settings (ALFWorld ID/OOD and TextCraft).

Code, training/evaluation scripts, andmodel checkpointsare publicly available. Happy to discuss the method, results, and limitations!

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