Below the Noise Floor: Bimodal Seed Collapse and Distinct Failure Modes in Small-Model Knowledge Distillation

arXiv:2608.27729 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-08-27 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-08-27

Updated: 2026-08-27

Terminology

• Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Failure Modes — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Knowledge Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 11 episodes

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