English

DistillGuard: Evaluating Defenses Against LLM Knowledge Distillation

Cryptography and Security 2026-03-10 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language

Abstract

Knowledge distillation from proprietary LLM APIs poses a growing threat to model providers, yet defenses against this attack remain fragmented and unevaluated. We present DistillGuard, a framework for systematically evaluating output-level defenses against LLM knowledge distillation. We introduce a taxonomy of three defense categories -- output perturbation, data poisoning, and information throttling -- and evaluate nine defense configurations using a standardized pipeline with Qwen3-14B as teacher and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct as student across three benchmarks (MATH-500, HumanEval+, MT-Bench). Our results reveal that, in a same-family distillation setting against a naive attacker, most output-level defenses are surprisingly ineffective: paraphrasing-based perturbation barely degrades distilled student quality, and data poisoning primarily impairs conversational fluency while leaving task-specific capabilities intact. Only chain-of-thought removal substantially impairs mathematical reasoning (31.4\% vs.\ 67.8\% baseline), though code generation remains unaffected. These findings demonstrate that the effectiveness of distillation defenses is highly task-dependent and that current output-level approaches are insufficient to broadly prevent knowledge theft.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.07835,
  title  = {DistillGuard: Evaluating Defenses Against LLM Knowledge Distillation},
  author = {Bo Jiang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.07835},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:09:28.447Z