How Is Uncertainty Propagated in Knowledge Distillation?

Abstract

Knowledge distillation transfers behavior from a teacher to a student model, but the process is inherently stochastic: teacher outputs, student training, and student inference can all be random. Collapsing these uncertainties to a single point estimate can distort what is learned. We systematically study how uncertainty propagates through knowledge distillation across three representative model classes--linear regression, feed-forward neural networks, and large language models (LLMs)--and propose simple corrections. We distinguish inter-student uncertainty (variance across independently distilled students) from intra-student uncertainty (variance of a single student's predictive distribution), showing that standard single-response knowledge distillation suppresses intra-student variance while leaving substantial inter-student variability. To address these mismatches, we introduce two variance-aware strategies: averaging multiple teacher responses, which reduces noise at rate $O(1/k)$, and variance-weighting, which combines teacher and student estimates via inverse-variance weighting to yield a minimum-variance estimator. We provide formal guarantees in linear regression, validate the methods in neural networks, and demonstrate empirical gains in LLM distillation, including reduced systematic noise and hallucination. These results reframe knowledge distillation as an uncertainty transformation and show that variance-aware distillation produces more stable students that better reflect teacher uncertainty.