arXiv Computation and Language By Houcheng Jiang, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Qiyong Zhong, Jie Sun, Tianyu Zhang, Junfeng Fang

ReCal: Calibrating Structured Pruning for On-Policy Distillation Recovery

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ReCal introduces a Recovery‑Aware Calibration method that adjusts calibration statistics before structured pruning to preserve teacher‑supported predictions. By using forward KL divergence between an unpruned teacher and a pruned probe, ReCal reweights pruning criteria to reduce damage that persists after offline distillation. Experiments show that ReCal consistently improves mathematical reasoning performance after on‑policy distillation, achieving up to 16.7 percentage‑point gains on AIME and better code‑generation results across multiple models and pruning methods.

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