Distilling big-RL models into small ones breeds overconfident agents without calibration RL
willcb · x · 2026-10-05
willcb argues that the common "big model RL -> smaller model distill" pipeline has a structural flaw: a general-purpose smaller distill without follow-up RL for calibration will necessarily be overconfident and under-use reasoning, because awareness of one's own capabilities isn't carried over by distillation. Conclusion: distillation shouldn't be the endpoint—small models need additional RL to recalibrate their sense of their own limits.
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