Showing the teacher the gold answer adds less to self-distillation than the distillation itself.

arXiv 2609.20612 builds AMPLE-Math, 5,319 math problems with six reasoning views sharing the same answer, and matches each view against reference-free distillation. With a thinking-enabled teacher supervising direct-response rollouts, reference-free distillation accounts for most of Qwen3-1.7B's gain in domain and on external benchmarks. Evidence for an extra reference benefit is modest in Qwen, strongest for a polished solution, and complete traces add two points in SmolLM3-3B at step 50. arXiv Ablate the gold answer before paying for it.