Weak Supervision, Strong Models: Exploring the Performance Boundary of Weak-to-Strong Generalization

When a weak model supervises a strong model, can the strong model truly surpass its supervisor? OpenAI’s experiments found that simple fine-tuning recovers only about half of the performance gap. With confidence loss and guidance strategies, the gap can shrink to around 20%, but boundaries remain. This article breaks down the mechanisms and engineering practice behind the study.