KDFlow: A User-Friendly and Efficient Knowledge Distillation Framework for Large Language Models
Knowledge distillation (KD) is widely used to compress and post-train large language models (LLMs), yet many existing frameworks execute teacher inference with the same training-oriented backend as student optimization, leading to suboptimal efficiency. In this paper, we propose KDFlow, a novel framework for LLM distillation that features a decoupled architecture and employs SGLang for teacher inference. KDFlow combines SGLang for teacher inference with PyTorch FSDP2 for student optimization, allowing each model to run on a backend tailored to its workload. To enable efficient full-vocabulary distillation in this decoupled architecture, KDFlow transfers the teacher's final hidden states v...
| Authors | Songming Zhang, Xue Zhang, Tong Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 2 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 September 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.