← 研踪 PaperTrailACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.908 · 记录 #1
Distillation Traps and Guards: A Calibration Knob for LLM Distillability
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 21:58
摘要
Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers capabilities from large language models (LLMs) to smaller students, yet it can fail unpredictably and also underpins model leakage risks. Our analysis revealed several distillation traps: tail noise, off-policy instability, and, most fundamentally, the teacher–student gap, that distort training signals. These traps manifest as overconfident hallucinations, self-correction collapse, and local decoding degradation, causing distillation to fail. Motivated by these findings, we propose a post-hoc calibration method that, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time enables control over a teacher’s distillability via reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Our objective combines task utility, KL anchor, and across-tokenizer calibration reward. This makes distillability a practical safety lever for foundation models, connecting robust teacher–student transfer with deployment-aware model protection. Experiments across math, knowledge QA, and instruction-following tasks show that students distilled from distillable calibrated teachers outperform SFT and KD baselines, while undistillable calibrated teachers retain their task performance but cause distilled students to collapse, offering a practical knob for both better KD and model IP protection.
论文发现出处
这些页面提供论文线索，不代表同行评审或质量认证。
观测到的版本
平台记录号代表本站观测到的元数据变化，不是作者修订号。来源日期仅到月份或年份时，按该月或该年首日存档。
记录 #1 · 2026-07 · 最新观测版本
Distillation Traps and Guards: A Calibration Knob for LLM Distillability
Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers capabilities from large language models (LLMs) to smaller students, yet it can fail unpredictably and also underpins model leakage risks. Our analysis revealed several distillation traps: tail noise, off-policy instability, and, most fundamentally, the teacher–student gap, that distort training signals. These traps manifest as overconfident hallucinations, self-correction collapse, and local decoding degradation, causing distillation to fail. Motivated by these findings, we propose a post-hoc calibration method that, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time enables control over a teacher’s distillability via reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Our objective combines task utility, KL anchor, and across-tokenizer calibration reward. This makes distillability a practical safety lever for foundation models, connecting robust teacher–student transfer with deployment-aware model protection. Experiments across math, knowledge QA, and instruction-following tasks show that students distilled from distillable calibrated teachers outperform SFT and KD baselines, while undistillable calibrated teachers retain their task performance but cause distilled students to collapse, offering a practical knob for both better KD and model IP protection.
查看此版本解读 →查看此版本原文 ↗