Understanding the Role of Prompt Template in Knowledge Distillation for Safety Alignment

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.30802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior research has demonstrated that the choice of prompt template during Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) significantly impacts the robustness of safety alignment afterwards. However, the influence of template selection during Knowledge Distillation (KD) from teacher to student remains largely unexplored. Thus, we fill this gap by analyzing how different template configurations influence the pre-existing safety alignment of the student. We observe a s