The Asymmetric Effects of Knowledge Distillation on Bias in Small Language Models
arXiv:2607. 28639v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that knowledge distillation in small instruction-tuned language models has asymmetric effects on bias.
LLM tutoring poses a measurement problem: can a general-purpose helpfulness rubric distinguish direct answer-giving from pedagogical guidance? We audit this signal in a pre-registered study.
arXiv:2607. 28639v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that knowledge distillation in small instruction-tuned language models has asymmetric effects on bias.
arXiv:2608. 11922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive-distribution entropy makes a strong selection rule in retrieval-augmented question answering: across five QA benchmarks, keeping the candidate answer that a frozen respondent LLM produces with the lowest answer-token entropy lifts mean answer $F_1$ from 0.
arXiv:2606. 16206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly proposed as educational tutors, yet stronger task-solving ability does not necessarily imply stronger learning support.
arXiv:2606. 15127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models are increasingly used in settings where the final answer is not the only object of review: educational tools may show students intermediate steps, decision-support systems may require human oversight, and audit workflows may inspect traces for misleading or biased input.
arXiv:2607. 04572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) tutors often produce fluent step-by-step explanations, but a correct and pedagogically formatted response does not guarantee that the answer was derived from the student-facing problem.
arXiv:2607. 14707v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models routinely produce fluent answers to single-shot prompts, yet deploying them as reliable components of a domain decision system is substantially harder.
arXiv:2607. 18293v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) teaches large language models new skills through a teacher that shares the student's backbone and supervises its own rollouts.
arXiv:2607. 14111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can small language models detect and report on perturbations their own internal activations?
arXiv:2607. 21692v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse attention prunes a long context to the blocks a model needs, and the usual selector is distilled from a dense teacher's attention.
arXiv:2608. 05411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as AI tutors, but a correct answer is not always a pedagogically appropriate one.
arXiv:2608. 04794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation (SD) has emerged as a compute-efficient alternative to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards: a self-teacher, conditioned on privileged information (PI) about the answer such as a reference solution, supplies dense per-token supervision to a student that never sees it.
arXiv:2608. 09548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed in education as tutors, teaching assistants, and content generators.