Self-Distillation as a Performance Recovery Mechanism for LLMs: Counteracting Compression and Catastrophic Forgetting
Researchers introduce Self-Distillation Fine-Tuning (SDFT), a framework that recovers performance degradation in Large Language Models caused by compression, quantization, and catastrophic forgetting. Using Centered Kernel Alignment analysis, the study demonstrates that self-distillation works by aligning the student model's high-dimensional manifold with the teacher model's optimal representation structure.