arxivstat.MLcs.LG2026-07-16
Optimal Self-Distillation for Rectified Flow via Linear Probing
Saptarshi Roy, Debepsita Mukherjee, Pratik Patil
Modern generative models are increasingly trained using model-generated signals, creating both opportunities for self-improvement and risks of collapse. We study optimal self-distillation (SD) for rectified flow (RF): given a suboptimal teacher velocity field, can a student train…