Imprinting: Knowledge Distillation Can Shift Student Behavior
Knowledge distillation trains student models on teacher-generated responses to transfer task capability, but those responses may also carry behavioral tendencies of their source. We investigate whether the source teacher can shape student behavior beyond the capability that distillation is intended to transfer. We construct harm-accepting and harm-avoiding variants of the same base teacher, use them to generate responses to ordinary reasoning and knowledge questions unrelated to safety, and distill those responses into students with different base models. Students generally acquire task capability while their downstream decisions shift toward the source teacher's safety-pragmatism disposi...
| Authors | Yu-Chien Tang, An-Zi Yen |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 October 2026 |
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