MASS: Multi-mask Selective Self-Distillation for Leakage-Resilient Reasoning
Xiuqi Liu, Oveys Delafrooz Noroozi, Upamanyu Madhow
Abstract
On-policy self-distillation enables the same model to act as student and teacher, with dense token-level supervision obtained by the teacher being given access to privileged information. However, conditioning the teacher on a single reference can concentrate its predictions on one reasoning trajectory and limit transfer to the student. We propose Multi-Mask Selective Self-Distillation (MASS), which approximates the unavailable marginal over diverse reference realizations using multiple independently masked views of one verified solution. MASS aggregates these complementary teacher predictions, selectively transfers reliable token-level corrections, and adaptively focuses masking on influential reference spans. Across mathematical reasoning benchmarks and model families, MASS consistently outperforms strong self-distillation baselines.