SRA: Span Representation Alignment for Large Language Model Distillation

arXiv:2605.01205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-Tokenizer Knowledge Distillation (CTKD) enables knowledge transfer between a large language model and a smaller student, even when they employ different tokenizers. While existing approaches mainly focus on token-level alignment strategies, which are often brittle and sensitive to discrepancies between tokenizers, we argue that the method of aggregating tokens into more robust representations before distillation is of equal importance. In thi...