A Unified Approach to Interpreting Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models via Interactions
arXiv:2607.08776v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the success of knowledge distillation (KD) in Large Language Models (LLMs), the underlying mechanism behind its efficacy remains unclear. In this paper, we propose a unified approach to explore the common mechanism of various KD methods using interactions. Specifically, we decompose the output score of the LLM into the sum of numerous interactions. Each interaction represents a nonlinear relationship involving a set of input variables (e.g.