Below the Noise Floor: Bimodal Seed Collapse and Distinct Failure Modes in Small-Model Knowledge Distillation
Function routing -- selecting the correct API call from a fixed catalog given a natural-language request -- is a deployment problem where small students are attractive but knowledge distillation gains are typically reported single-seed, at scales where seed variance is unknown. On a 740-instance healthcare API routing task with a 1.5B Qwen student and a 20B teacher, we compare eight KD variants against supervised cross-entropy, using three to six seeds for key configurations. We find: (i) per-seed standard deviation ranges from 2.8 to 48.7 percentage points, swallowing every claimed KD gain below five points; (ii) three of seven KD variants exhibit bimodal collapse, with at least one in t...
| Authors | Dipto Sumit, Sakib Ul Haque, Farig Sadeque |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 August 2026 |
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