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Contract: teacher = the same base model, conditioned on feedback about the student’s own prior attempt (not a full reference answer — that’s OPSD). Caller math: Same teacher-forced mechanism as OPSD — both use advantage = teacher_logprob - student_logprob — following “Reinforcement Learning via Self-Distillation” (Hübotter et al., 2026): “the current model conditioned on feedback as a self-teacher… without any external teacher or explicit reward model.”
Distinct from the unrelated, same-acronym “sDPO: Don’t Use Your Data All at Once” — sequential preference-data subsetting for offline DPO, not self-distillation.
Whitney mapping: Same as OPSD — a frozen second Whitney run — with the teacher prompt built from feedback or critique instead of a golden answer. Fail closed: You must supply a real tokenized feedback-conditioned prompt — there is no default critique.
rl_datum and forward_backward_payload are the shared datum helpers.