Learning from All: Concept Alignment for Autonomous Distillation from Multiple Drifting MLLMs

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission525 Authors

Keywords: concept drift, transfer learning, multi view, knowledge distillation, multi modal large language model

Abstract: This paper identifies a critical yet underexplored challenge in distilling from multi-modal large language models (MLLMs): the reasoning trajectories generated by multiple drifting teachers exhibit concept drift, whereby their reasoning distributions evolve unpredictably and transmit biases to the student model, ultimately compromising its performance. To tackle this issue, we pioneer a theoretical connection between concept drift and knowledge distillation, casting the non-stationary reasoning dynamics from multiple MLLM teachers as next-token prediction of multi-stream reasoning trajectories. Guided by concept drift, we introduce the “learn–compare–critique” paradigm, culminating in autonomous preference optimization (APO). Under the active guidance of the teachers, the student model first learns and self-distils preferred thinking by comparing multiple teachers. It then engages in critical reflection over the drifting inference from teachers, performing concept alignment through APO, ultimately yielding a robust, consistent, and generalizable model. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superior performance of consistency, robustness and generalization within knowledge distillation. Besides, we also contributed a large-scale dataset CXR-MAX (Multi-teachers Alignment X-rays), comprising 170,982 distilled reasoning trajectories derived from publicly accessible MLLMs based on MIMIC-CXR. Our code and data are public at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Autonomous-Distillation/.

Primary Area: learning theory

Submission Number: 525