arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

MAIGO: Mitigating Lost-in-Conversation with History-Cleaned On-Policy Self-Distillation

Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.

Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2605.27186 (cs)
[Submitted on 26 May 2026]

Title:MAIGO: Mitigating Lost-in-Conversation with History-Cleaned On-Policy Self-Distillation

View a PDF of the paper titled MAIGO: Mitigating Lost-in-Conversation with History-Cleaned On-Policy Self-Distillation, by Haoyu Zheng and 7 other authors
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Large language models often solve tasks from a fully specified prompt but degrade when the same requirements unfold over multiple turns, known as the lost-in-conversation (LiC) gap. We trace part of this degradation to self-contamination: intermediate assistant replies enter later context and carry early deviations forward. Motivated by this mechanism, we propose MAIGO, an on-policy self-distillation method that reduces this contamination using history-cleaned references from the model's own policy. For middle turns, MAIGO removes prior assistant replies while preserving the user-visible sharded prefix; for answer turns, it distills from paired full-view references conditioned on the completed user-side dialogue. A reliability weight downweights middle-turn samples that disagree with the clean reference. MAIGO requires no verifier rewards, state labels, or inference-time scaffolding. Under the LiC paired-view protocol with deterministic verifiers, MAIGO improves Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct SHARDED accuracy from 52.8 to 66.1 and the SHARDED/FULL ratio from 66.5% to 84.1%, while keeping FULL accuracy within 2.3 points. These results show that self-contamination is a trainable component of the LiC gap.
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.27186 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2605.27186v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.27186
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Haoyu Zheng [view email]
[v1] Tue, 26 May 2026 15:38:46 UTC (777 KB)
Full-text links:

Access Paper:

    View a PDF of the paper titled MAIGO: Mitigating Lost-in-Conversation with History-Cleaned On-Policy Self-Distillation, by Haoyu Zheng and 7 other authors
  • View PDF
  • HTML (experimental)
  • TeX Source

Current browse context:

cs.CL
< prev   |   next >
Change to browse by:
cs

References & Citations

Loading...

BibTeX formatted citation

loading...
Data provided by:

Bookmark

BibSonomy Reddit
Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Discussion (0)

Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.

Sign in →

No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.

More from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language