Distilling What Matters: Confidence-Aware Selective Distillation for Large Language Models
Knowledge Distillation (KD) trains a smaller-capacity student model to imitate a larger-capacity teacher model by matching output distributions, implicitly assuming the teacher to be a reliable oracle. In large language models (LLMs), this assumption often fails: teacher predictions can exhibit high entropy and hallucinations, causing standard KD to degrade well-calibrated student priors. We propose CaRE-KD, a confidence-gated distillation framework that replaces static objectives with uncertainty-adaptive optimization. CaRE-KD has two components: a token-level loss (CaRE-Divergence) that adaptively switches between Forward and Reverse KL divergence based on teacher--student confidence, a...
| Authors | Ayan Sengupta, Vaibhav Seth, Tanmoy Chakraborty |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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