arXiv Machine Learning

Toward Efficient Uncertainty in LLMs through Evidential Knowledge Distillation

arXiv:2507. 18366v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate uncertainty quantification remains a key challenge for standard LLMs, prompting the adoption of Bayesian and ensemble-based methods.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Reference-Based Distillation Detection in LLMs

arXiv:2607. 09692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model distillation -- training on outputs from stronger third-party models -- is widely used to boost performance, but raises concerns about unfair advantages and policy violations.

By Rajat Rawat, Sizhe Chen, Akshay Anand, Michael Duan, Bob Rotsted, Sewon Min
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Why Does Self-Distillation (Sometimes) Degrade the Reasoning Capability of LLMs?

The paper investigates why self‑distillation can sometimes worsen the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). It finds that the process suppresses the model’s epistemic verbalization—its expression of uncertainty—leading to shorter but less accurate responses in mathematical reasoning tasks. Experiments on several LLMs show performance drops of up to 40%, especially on out‑of‑distribution problems where uncertainty expression is beneficial.

By Jeonghye Kim, Xufang Luo, Minbeom Kim, Sangmook Lee, Dohyung Kim, Jiwon Jeon, Dongsheng Li, Yuqing Yang
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Distillation of Tabular Foundation Models into Efficient Predictors

The paper presents a method for distilling tabular foundation models (TFMs) into lightweight, dataset‑specific students. By using the full labeled training set as teacher context and training students on both observed and synthetic queries, the authors achieve significant performance gains over traditional supervised models on TabArena and TALENT benchmarks. The distilled students also provide substantial inference speedups, reducing the cost of repeated inference.

By Minho Jeong, Dooho Lee, Jinmo Lee, Jaemin Yoo
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

Activation-Conditioned Self-Distillation

arXiv:2609.38342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation uses a model as its own teacher to provide dense supervision for reasoning, often through reference-solution conditioning....

By Zhexi Lu, Subhajit Chaudhury, Tejaswini Pedapati, Keerthiram Murugesan, Lei Yu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Uni-OPD: Unifying On-Policy Distillation with a Dual-Perspective Recipe

arXiv:2605. 03677v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for consolidating the capabilities of specialized expert models into a single student model.

By Wenjin Hou, Shangpin Peng, Weinong Wang, Zheng Ruan, Yue Zhang, Zhenglin Zhou, Mingqi Gao, Yifei Chen, Kaiqi Wang, Hongming Yang, Chengquan Zhang, Zhuotao Tian, Han Hu, Yi Yang, Fei Wu, Hehe Fan
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

IDeaL: Data-Free Multi-Teacher Distillation via Improved Dead Leaves

The paper introduces IDeaL, a data‑free multi‑teacher distillation technique that generates teacher‑specific, improved samples using decorrelation losses at patch and image levels. By tailoring noise to each teacher, IDeaL produces strong student models that capture complementary teacher information and achieve results close to those distilled from real images. Experiments demonstrate that with only 1,000 images, students trained on IDeaL samples match or exceed the performance of students distilled from a 1,000‑image subset of ImageNet.

By Feyza Yavuz, Mert B\"ulent Sar{\i}y{\i}ld{\i}z, Diane Larlus