Coupled Calibration and Learning: Mitigating Teacher Bias in LLM Distillation without Target-Domain Reward Feedback
Haichen Hu, Yuheng Zhang, David Simchi-Levi
arXiv:2609.17474v1Today’s standout paper is about a practical problem in AI deployment: how do you train a smaller language model from a stronger teacher without copying over the teacher’s mistakes and biases? This becomes especially hard when the target domain is different from the source, and you don’t have reward feedback for the target questions. The authors propose Coupled Calibration and Learning, or CCL, which alternates between two steps: first, it calibrates the teacher using feedback from source data, then it uses that improved teacher to train the student on target data. The key twist is that the student’s updates also feed back into later calibration, creating a coupled loop instead of one-way imitation. The paper gives a convergence proof showing the student can approach the oracle best possible student over time. That matters because distillation is a core technique for making AI systems cheaper and faster, and this work shows a path to make them more reliable too.
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