Understanding the Role of Prompt Template in Knowledge Distillation for Safety Alignment
Prior research has demonstrated that the choice of prompt template during Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) significantly impacts the robustness of safety alignment afterwards. However, the influence of template selection during Knowledge Distillation (KD) from teacher to student remains largely unexplored. Thus, we fill this gap by analyzing how different template configurations influence the pre-existing safety alignment of the student. We observe a significant degradation of safety alignment present in the aligned base instruct-tuned model. Specifically, we find that utilizing chat templates renders the model more compliant with harmful queries compared to a non-chat template. These finding...
| Authors | Anjila Budathoki, Manish Dhakal, Benjamin M. Ampel et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 25 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 September 2026 |
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