The Asymmetric Effects of Knowledge Distillation on Bias in Small Language Models

arXiv:2607.28639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that knowledge distillation in small instruction-tuned language models has asymmetric effects on bias. On unambiguous tasks (BBQ-disambig), response-based distillation from a Gemma-2-9B teacher improves context-following: for the most biased baseline (SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct), it cuts the context-overriding error rate from 44% to 24%. On ambiguous tasks (BBQ-ambig), the same distillation destroys per-item refusal calibration: 15% of items whe...