When Context Returns: Toward Robust Internalization in On-Policy Distillation

Abstract

Recent work has shown that on-policy distillation can internalize privileged context, such as system prompts or task hints, into a student model so that the context is no longer needed at inference time. However, we identify a counterintuitive and previously unstudied phenomenon: reintroducing the original privileged context to the distilled student often degrades its performance, even on instances it already solves correctly without context. We term this phenomenon context-induced degradation and argue that robust internalization requires not only matching the teacher's context-conditioned behavior, but also remaining stable when the privileged context is reintroduced, a desirable property we call context invariance. To promote this property, we formulate a novel view-robust internalization risk and propose No-Context Anchoring (NCA), a lightweight yet effective consistency regularizer that uses the student's stop-gradient no-context output as an anchor and aligns its context-conditioned output via forward KL divergence. Across 14 configurations spanning diverse domains and model families, NCA improves context-conditioned accuracy in most settings and reduces context harm in 12 out of 14, while preserving or improving no-context performance, demonstrating greater robustness to context reintroduction.