3 ms·

Can you explain how COT is essential to distillation and why obfuscating it helps defend against distillation? Or point me in the right direction in terms of w

• Otterly99 2mo ago
  Because they are an integral part of the solution generation. By distilling, you are training a model via Reinforcement Learning (RL) to mimic the answer of a bigger model. To do that, you need all the steps that contributed to generating an answer. To give you a better idea, imagine teaching a student how to solve math problem: 1. You give it the problem and the answer only (no thinking trace) 2. You give it the problem, the intermediary steps and the answer (full transcript) I think you can agree that the second method is more likely to give a well-informed student.
  • maleldil 2mo ago
    Isn't distillation done through SFT by having the student model approximate the teacher's output distribution?
• rikima_ 2mo ago
  This might be helpful https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09867 https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09867