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Protecting Language Models Against Unauthorized Distillation through Trace Rewriting
来源日期（仅到月份） 2026-07
来源记录日期 2026-07
雷达观测 2026-11-01 22:02
摘要
Knowledge distillation is a widely adopted technique for transferring capabilities from LLMs to smaller, more efficient student models.However, unauthorized use of knowledge distillation takes unfair advantage of the considerable effort and cost put into developing frontier models.We investigate methods for modifying teacher-generated reasoning traces to achieve two objectives that deter unauthorized distillation: (1) anti-distillation, or degrading the training usefulness of query responses, and (2) API watermarking, which embeds verifiable signatures in student models.We introduce several approaches for dynamically rewriting a teacher’s reasoning outputs while preserving answer correctness and semantic coherence.Two of these leverage the rewriting capabilities of LLMs, while others use gradient-based techniques.Our experiments show that a simple instruction-based rewriting approach achieves a strong anti-distillation effect while maintaining or even improving teacher performance.Furthermore, we show that our rewriting approach also enables embedding watermarks that can be reliably detectedwith essentially no false alarms.Our code is available at https://github.com/xhOwenMa/trace-rewriting.
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记录 #1 · 2026-07 · 最新观测版本
Protecting Language Models Against Unauthorized Distillation through Trace Rewriting
Knowledge distillation is a widely adopted technique for transferring capabilities from LLMs to smaller, more efficient student models.However, unauthorized use of knowledge distillation takes unfair advantage of the considerable effort and cost put into developing frontier models.We investigate methods for modifying teacher-generated reasoning traces to achieve two objectives that deter unauthorized distillation: (1) anti-distillation, or degrading the training usefulness of query responses, and (2) API watermarking, which embeds verifiable signatures in student models.We introduce several approaches for dynamically rewriting a teacher’s reasoning outputs while preserving answer correctness and semantic coherence.Two of these leverage the rewriting capabilities of LLMs, while others use gradient-based techniques.Our experiments show that a simple instruction-based rewriting approach achieves a strong anti-distillation effect while maintaining or even improving teacher performance.Furthermore, we show that our rewriting approach also enables embedding watermarks that can be reliably detectedwith essentially no false alarms.Our code is available at https://github.com/xhOwenMa/trace-rewriting.
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