Knowledge Distillation During Mid-Training Favors Reasoning over Factual Recall
Switch Distillation is proposed, a simple mid-training objective that distills on tokens where the teacher is confident, using teacher predictive entropy as a lightweight routing signal, and otherwise falls back to cross-entropy, which consistently outperforms existing distillation objectives across teacher sizes.
Jacqueline He, Howard Yen, S. Li et al.
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