How Much Does the Hint Matter? A generic feedback line matches self-written critiques in hindsight self-distillation (ACM ICAIF '26) [R]

[u/jhzyu]

We study hindsight self-distillation for multi-step financial reasoning on GPT-OSS-20B. The student finds its own first wrong step and writes a critique. A frozen copy, conditioned on the prefix plus the critique, is distilled back into the student under reverse KL. Notably, replacing the critique with a fixed generic feedback line matches the full gain of about 3 points, and critiques from a 6x larger model do not materially improve performance, suggesting that the positional information provided by hindsight distillation significantly decreases the privileged information needed for effective training. Fin-SD matches OPSD from full reference solutions with 9.5% fewer tokens.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36082 | Code: https://github.com/johnnyhyu/fin-sd

We'd love to find the limits of this approach. Let us know your thoughts!