AI article
Your Distilled Model Performs Worse Than the Teacher
Community description: Model distillation looks straightforward until the student collapses into a weaker copy. Here is what breaks and how to fix it.
Dev.to | Sep 14, 2026 | RobustTrueTry
Automated excerpt
Standard distillation trains a student to match the teacher's softmax outputs directly. The problem: without temperature scaling, the teacher's probability distribution is overconfident. Distillation assumes the teacher's outputs contain usable signal.
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