What the Abstention Option Measures: Refusal Loss, Sampling Churn, and Option Capture in Distilled Small Language Models

arXiv:2607.28639 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY · Submitted 2026-05-19 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY

Submitted: 2026-05-19

Updated: 2026-10-24

Terminology

• Distillation — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Abstention — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Calibration — 1× in this paper · explained in 9 episodes
• Knowledge Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Knowledge Distillation (KD) — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes

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