arXiv Computation and Language

Label Smoothing in Disguise? Gated Knowledge Distillation for Low-Resource Bangla Generation

The paper investigates gated knowledge distillation (KD) for low‑resource Bangla generation, testing two gating strategies—EWAD and CHAD—to selectively trust teacher signals. Across six Bangla tasks and multiple student models, neither gate improves over plain KD, and KD generally underperforms cross‑entropy fine‑tuning on gold outputs. The primary advantage of KD is regularisation, with teacher‑free label smoothing narrowing the performance gap, though gating only modestly alters this effect.

arXiv AI
Jul 23

When Does Knowledge Distillation Hurt? Reliability-Aware Distillation for Low-Resource Language Summarization

arXiv:2607. 19956v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is a standard approach for compressing sequence-to-sequence models, but its per-sample effects are rarely examined.

By Dipto Sumit, Ankan Kumar Roy Srizon, Sadia Khair Rodela, Atia Haque Asha, Mourchona Afrin, Niloy Farhan, Farig Sadeque
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Verify Before You Distill: Prompt-Level Teacher Gating for On-Policy Distillation

The paper introduces Teacher-Gated On-Policy Distillation (TGOPD), a method that verifies teacher reliability at the prompt level before applying dense supervision in on-policy distillation. TGOPD uses verifier-scored teacher probes to decide whether to route a prompt to dense OPD or to a verifier-grounded alternative. Experiments on 4B and 35B models across mathematics, code, and instruction tasks show TGOPD outperforms vanilla OPD and improves teacher GPU utilization from 9.8% to 78.9% in a 4B single-domain run.

By Zhiwei Zhang, Zechen Sun, Fei Zhao, Kang Peng, Bin Liang, Huayu Deng, Yao Hu, Kam-Fai Wong, Mu Chuan
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Reward-Gated On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2607. 04037v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation is a powerful way to transfer reasoning ability from a strong teacher to a smaller student: the student samples trajectories from its own policy, and the teacher provides dense token-level supervision on the states the student actually visits.

By Mohammad Sadegh Akhondzadeh, Vijay Lingam, Atula Tejaswi, Chanakya Ekbote, Sujay Sanghavi, Aleksandar Bojchevski
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Knowledge Distillation During Mid-Training Favors Reasoning over Factual Recall

arXiv:2609.01532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Logit-based knowledge distillation (KD) is used to train smaller language models (LMs) via supervision from stronger teachers, but whether its benefits...

By Jacqueline He, Howard Yen, Shuyue Stella Li, Margaret Li, Hanqing Zeng, Yinglong Xia, Benyu Zhang, Zhuokai Zhao, Qiang Zhang, Pang Wei Koh, Luke Zettlemoyer, Wen-tau Yih
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

CSD: Common-Support Distillation for Cross-Tokenizer Knowledge Transfer

The paper introduces Common‑Support Distillation (CSD), a logits‑based framework for transferring knowledge across different tokenizers by constructing a shared support between teacher and student distributions. CSD handles both one‑to‑one alignments using explicit common‑token pairs and other alignments by creating a virtual support via the autoregressive chain rule, while a residual event ensures normalization. Experiments on Llama‑3.2‑1B, Gemma3‑1B‑PT, Qwen, and Phi models show that CSD consistently outperforms existing cross‑tokenizer methods, achieving up to 1.8‑point gains over the best alternative and surpassing both continued pretraining and same‑tokenizer distillation.

By Mingyu Yang, Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Adithyakrishna Venkatesh Hanasoge, Nima Tajbakhsh, Ashwath Aithal, Pavlo Molchanov
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Distill What You Trust: Reliability-Aware Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2609.23697v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-teacher on-policy distillation allows a student to learn from complementary specialists on its own trajectories. Domain-routed approaches, howe...

By Jie Sun, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Zeyuan Liu, Gengsheng Li, Houcheng Jiang, Yilin Cheng, Bichuan Feng, Yuchen Cai, Junfeng Fang, Xiang Wang