AI article
Distillation's Hidden Costs and Payoffs — Teachers Leak Behavior, Reward Models Surpass Them
Community description: Distillation imprints teacher behavior beyond the training domain, while new recipes let distilled reward models beat their teachers.
Dev.to | Oct 16, 2026 | Felipe 0liveira
Automated excerpt
Imprinting: Knowledge Distillation Can Shift Student Behavior — distilling on unrelated tasks still leaks the teacher's safety disposition. Apertus 1. 5 Release Notes — a fully documented SFT → RLVR → DPO → SDPO post-training stack. RM-OPD: On-Policy Distillation for Generative Reward Models — a distilled reward model that beats the specialist teachers it learned from.
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