Researchers Question Pedagogical RL: Student-Likelihood May Be a Flawed Learnability Proxy
novasarc01 · x · 2026-09-29
The author raises two concerns about the pedagogical RL paper: student-likelihood may be a poor proxy for learnability, since genuinely useful new reasoning moves can start with very low probability under the student — over-optimizing it could make distillation conservative and filter out those moves. And if the teacher has its own blind spots or style biases, some mechanism is still needed to decide which trajectory parts are worth transferring. Their proposed fix: search for successful trajectories near the student's support, then gate which teacher/token updates actually get distilled.
Related event: Researchers Question Pedagogical RL's Student-Likelihood Proxy(2 posts)→
More from Research
- Redditor post-trains an 80B MoE base into an agentic model on 4 V100s, livestreamed — jjusko20 · 2026-09-29
- Largest Open-Source Human Video Preference Dataset Released: 300K Annotations, 15 SOTA Models Ranked — _akhaliq · 2026-09-29
- Anthropic's claimed AI-discovered enzymes may have been known: Copenhagen researcher pushes back — JFPuget · 2026-09-29
- A theoretically grounded science of capable agents could inform AI safety and sentience criteria — aran_nayebi · 2026-09-29
- New JevBench and JevImageBench leaderboards are on the way — airesearch12 · 2026-09-29
- Pre-registered hypotheses failed, then the paper relabeled the study 'exploratory' — RexDouglass · 2026-09-29