The paper investigates whether a strong teacher is necessary for knowledge distillation in large language model pretraining. By varying teacher and student sizes and token budgets, the authors create strong‑to‑weak, same‑level, and weak‑to‑strong teacher‑student pairs and evaluate distillation effectiveness. They find that even small, undertrained teachers can improve larger students when losses are properly mixed, and that pushing teachers to be stronger can saturate or reverse gains, while distillation mainly boosts generalization rather than in‑domain fitting.
arXiv:2606. 09456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) has become a core technique in the post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs) for transferring knowledge from domain experts to student models.
arXiv:2605.06597v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-distillation (SD) offers a promising path for adapting large language models (LLMs) without relying on stronger external teachers. Howev...
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:2608.22898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) alleviate the inherent latency bottleneck of autoregressive (AR) large language models (LLMs), but their degraded gene...
arXiv:2609.36734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) trains a smaller-capacity student model to imitate a larger-capacity teacher model by matching output distributions, implic...
arXiv:2609.22566v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) aims to compress high-performance teacher LLMs into lightweight students. However, distilled students often exhibit subst...
arXiv:2603. 26556v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Converting a pretrained Transformer into a more efficient hybrid model through distillation offers a promising approach to reducing inference costs.
Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across many tasks, but their high computational cost limits deployment in resource-constrained environments. Knowledge Distillation (KD) offers a practical solution by transferring knowledge from a teacher model of a larger size to a smaller student model.
arXiv:2604.08880v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation transfers reasoning behaviors from a strong teacher to a smaller student, but prior work reports a capaci...
arXiv:2603. 15590v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: There have been numerous attempts to distill quadratic attention-based large language models (LLMs) into sub-quadratic linearized architectures.
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.
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.