The paper investigates correctness‑gated multi‑teacher distillation, comparing a weighted arm to unfiltered distillation across eight experimental arms. While the weighted arm shows modest gains in accuracy (+0.1660) and macro‑F1 (+0.1323) and a reduction in unsafe action rate (−0.4979), it also exhibits lost label functionality, such as zero Refuted recall and over‑assignment of NotEnoughInfo. A subsequent grounding audit was inconclusive, failing to demonstrate a clear improvement in evidence grounding or overall system performance.
arXiv:2607. 07050v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Top-K teacher logits make on-policy distillation tractable, but probability mass is not the same as decision support.
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. 14644v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world LLM deployments increasingly rely on runtime-injected prohibitions--enterprise policies, PII redlines, tool boundaries--that vary per request and per tenant.
The paper investigates selective on‑policy distillation, where a student model is trained only on token positions chosen by a selector. It demonstrates that the commonly used shared learning rate is not neutral: performance varies significantly with the learning rate for different selectors, leading to inconsistent comparisons. The authors attribute this selector‑rate entanglement to the selection process itself and recommend reporting the full arm‑by‑rate matrix for fair evaluation.
arXiv:2608. 04408v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) supervises student-visited trajectories, yet divergence-based rules cannot determine whether an erroneous prefix remains correctable.
arXiv:2605. 31191v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate how teacher-student capacity relationships modulate knowledge distillation (KD) effectiveness in ResNet-based image classification on CIFAR-10.
arXiv:2607. 12962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frozen small code LLMs are deployed locally, yet the information guiding a retry after a failed attempt is still measured without placebo controls in the self-repair literature.
The paper introduces Group‑Calibrated On‑Policy Distillation (GC‑OPD), a method that aligns token‑level teacher guidance with trajectory‑level verifier rewards for long‑context reasoning tasks. GC‑OPD normalizes rewards within rollout groups, uses the signed teacher‑verifier disagreement as a residual, and distributes this residual across tokens via Relative‑Advantage‑Based Credit Assignment (RACA). Experiments on five long‑context benchmarks show that GC‑OPD improves Qwen3‑4B and Qwen3‑8B checkpoints from 29.08/35.12 to 40.47/44.65, outperforming vanilla OPD and demonstrating the effectiveness of group‑relative residual calibration.
arXiv:2608. 10216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent frameworks ship quality gates that compare text blocks by embedding-cosine similarity and decide at a fixed cutoff.
The paper investigates how language‑model judges can make version‑dependent errors when evaluating upgraded agents. Using 35 public coding‑agent submissions, two customer‑service agents, and over a thousand expert‑labeled trajectories, the authors show that fixed judges often reject task‑conditioned error invariance and can incorrectly approve failed patches, especially as agent capability increases. Paired audits of current outputs reduce interval width only marginally, and the study concludes that independent human patch review is still necessary.
arXiv:2608. 07813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An LLM judge deployed inside a reasoning pipeline does not merely measure quality, it decides which answer ships.
arXiv:2609.05481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inter example relational distillation transfers a teacher's representation geometry by matching relations among examples within a mini batch. Computing...