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NeurIPS 2025

Knowledge Distillation Detection for Open-weights Models

Conference Paper Main Conference Track Artificial Intelligence · Machine Learning

Abstract

We propose the task of knowledge distillation detection, which aims to determine whether a student model has been distilled from a given teacher, under a practical setting where only the student’s weights and the teacher’s API are available. This problem is motivated by growing concerns about model provenance and unauthorized replication through distillation. To address this task, we introduce a model-agnostic framework that combines data-free input synthesis and statistical score computation for detecting distillation. Our approach is applicable to both classification and generative models. Experiments on diverse architectures for image classification and text-to-image generation show that our method improves detection accuracy over the strongest baselines by 59. 6\% on CIFAR-10, 71. 2\% on ImageNet, and 20. 0\% for text-to-image generation. The code is available at https: //github. com/shqii1j/distillation_detection.

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Keywords

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Context

Venue
Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Archive span
1987-2025
Indexed papers
30776
Paper id
36217152090863198
v2026.09.13