Strong Teacher Not Needed? On Distillation in LLM Pretraining

arXiv:2605.23857 · cs.LG, cs.CL · Submitted 2026-05-22 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG, cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-05-22

Updated: 2026-10-26

Terminology

• Distillation — 8× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Knowledge Distillation — 2× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 14 episodes

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