When Does Knowledge Distillation Hurt? Reliability-Aware Distillation for Low-Resource Language Summarization
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a standard approach for compressing sequence-to-sequence models, but its per-sample effects are rarely examined. On the BanSum Bangla summarization benchmark, we find that standard KD improves ROUGE-L by only +0.0003 over a cross-entropy baseline, and that approximately 51.3% of training samples are estimated to actively harm student validation loss under standard KD. We propose two complementary reliability-aware distillation methods. CHAD (Counterfactual Harm-Aware Distillation) measures per-sample KD usefulness via gradient alignment with the validation loss direction and trains a lightweight gate that generalizes this counterfactual judgment to the full ...
| Authors | Dipto Sumit, Ankan Kumar Roy Srizon, Sadia Khair Rodela et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 22 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 July 2026 |
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