Trust Functions: Near-Lossless Weak-to-Strong Generalization by Learning When to Trust the Weak Teacher

arXiv:2606.01000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Weak-to-strong generalization studies how to improve a strong student using supervision from a weaker teacher when reliable labels are scarce. We view this primarily as a data selection problem, where the key challenge is to identify which weak labels are reliable enough to serve as a training signal. To address this, we introduce trust functions that assign each weak label a scalar trust score and use these scores to filter weak supervision. Across several domains, including world knowledge, quantitative reasoning, and strategy games, trust fi