arXiv Machine Learning

KDFP: A first-principles approach to knowledge distillation in large language models

KDFP is a new white‑box methodology for general knowledge distillation in large language models, addressing a gap left by prior work that focused mainly on post‑training abilities such as instruction following and chain‑of‑thought reasoning. The authors evaluate lessons from earlier studies and conduct new experiments to design a distillation approach tailored to modern LLMs. KDFP achieves 1.6%–4.9% higher performance across nine benchmarks and improves training efficiency by up to 99.1% through reduced temporary parameters.

arXiv AI
5d ago

Universal Textual Teaching for LLMs

The paper introduces Universal Textual Teaching (UTT), a parameter‑update‑free framework that distills knowledge gaps between a Teacher and Student large language model into a reusable natural‑language artifact called a Primer. UTT identifies representative gap cases, then iteratively refines the Primer through a cycle of student attempts, prompter‑generated teaching instructions, teacher demonstrations, and synthesizer consolidation. Experiments on math (Omni‑MATH‑2) and code generation (KernelBench) show significant accuracy gains, outperforming prompt engineering and parameter‑based knowledge distillation, and the Primer generalizes across different Teacher‑Student pairs.

By Zhanyi Lu, Huan Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Masked Self-Distillation: Internalizing the Chain-of-Thought in Language Models

The paper introduces masked self‑distillation, a post‑training framework that trains a language model to internalize portions of its own intermediate reasoning traces. By varying the fraction of trace internalized, the authors demonstrate that models can achieve higher inference efficiency and improved task performance on math and graph‑coloring problems. Experiments on Qwen3‑4B and Qwen3‑8B show that the method generalizes well to in‑domain out‑of‑distribution cases without catastrophic forgetting, and that supervised fine‑tuning alone can reduce trace length at the expense of generalization.

By Durgesh Kalwar, Vardhan Palod, Jaya Adithya Pavuluri, Subbarao Kambhampati
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Hybrid Policy Distillation for LLMs

arXiv:2604. 20244v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is a powerful paradigm for compressing large language models (LLMs), whose effectiveness depends on intertwined choices of divergence direction, optimization strategy, and data regime.

By Wenhong Zhu, Ruobing Xie, Rui Wang, Pengfei Liu
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Reinforcement-aware Knowledge Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2602. 22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students.

By Zhaoyang Zhang, Shuli Jiang, Yantao Shen, Yuting Zhang, Dhananjay Ram, Shuo Yang, Zhuowen Tu, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto