New research traces distillation length inflation to student-teacher EOS token mismatch

tw_killian · x · 2026-09-20

New work from UNC, BYU, and Microsoft traces length inflation in on-policy distillation to student/teacher EOS mismatch: models can already solve the problem, then waste most of their token budget repeating output. The authors find that aligning decoding stop sets alone is not enough to fix the issue.

Related event: EOS Token Mismatch Behind Longer Distilled Outputs, Study Finds(2 posts)→

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