When Agents Look the Same: Quantifying Distillation-Induced Similarity in Tool-Use Behaviors
Model distillation is a primary driver behind the rapid progress of LLM agents, yet it often leads to behavioral homogenization. Many emerging agents share nearly identical reasoning steps and failure modes, suggesting they may be distilled echoes of a few dominant teachers. Existing metrics, however, fail to distinguish mandatory behaviors required for task success from non-mandatory patterns that reflect a model's autonomous preferences. We propose two complementary metrics to isolate non-mandatory behavioral patterns: \textbf{Response Pattern Similarity (RPS)} for verbal alignment and \textbf{Action Graph Similarity (AGS)} for tool-use habits modeled as directed graphs. Evaluating 18 m...
| Authors | Chenghao Yang, Yuning Zhang, Zhoufutu Wen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 23 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 April 2026 |
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