Less is More: Selective Reflection for Compatible and Efficient Knowledge Distillation in Large Language Models

Abstract

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a fundamental technique for compressing large language models (LLMs) into compact, efficient student models. However, existing white-box KD methods mainly focus on balancing ground truth and student-generated responses while overlooking two critical factors: training data quality and student-model compatibility. To address these limitations, we propose Selective Reflection Distillation (SRD), a novel data curation framework that leverages reflections from student models to systematically refine training data. SRD dynamically evaluates and selects prompt-response pairs by comparing ground truth data with student model outputs, selectively curating high-quality, student-compatible training instances through automated ranking based on difficulty. Furthermore, after selecting the training data, a curriculum scheduling strategy is employed to incrementally introduce these curated subsets into the distillation process at fixed intervals. As a plug-and-play enhancement, SRD consistently improves distillation outcomes across diverse white-box KD approaches and model architectures, as well as decreases computational cost significantly during KD training. Experiments on a range of language model benchmarks demonstrate SRD's consistent improvements in distilled model performance, as well as a reduction in training runtime by up to 39%, under diverse KD methods and model families. Notably, SRD operates as a plug-and-play module, enhancing sample efficiency without modifying underlying KD algorithms. Our findings highlight that data quality and compatibility are pivotal to effective and efficient distillation of LLMs, and SRD provides a principled framework to achieve both. This work advances the understanding of data-centric factors in KD and offers practical insights for enhancing the capability and efficiency of compressed LLMs.