Papers with controlled distillation
When Agents Look the Same: Quantifying Distillation-Induced Similarity in Tool-Use Behaviors (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics fail to distinguish mandatory behaviors required for task success from non-mandatory patterns that reflect a model’s autonomous preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use response pattern similarity and action graph similarity to isolate non-mandatory behaviors from mandatory behaviors. |
| Outcome: | Evaluating 18 models from 8 providers on -Bench and 2-Bench against Claude Sonnet 4.5, the authors find that within-family model pairs score 5.9 pp higher in response pattern similarity and action graph similarity . |