Definition
Plain language
Teaching a model by letting it make its own attempts and correcting each one, instead of just having it copy a master's work.
As stated in the literature
A distillation method where the student generates its own trajectories and training nudges them toward a teacher's outputs, keeping supervision on the student's own distribution; in self-trained verification it succeeds where plain SFT imitation collapses because the deployed verifier walks its own path.
Why it matters: By training a model on its own attempts rather than imitation alone, it avoids the breakdown that happens when a model is deployed and walks paths its copied examples never covered.
For example, instead of handing a student the master's finished essay to copy, you let the student write its own and correct each line as it goes.
Heard on the show
“It's called on-policy distillation.”Episode 099 — How an Open-Book Trick Teaches a Model to Catch Its Own Mistakes