Junhao Lin
Author directoryOther people with similar names: Junhao Lin
2026
When the Strongest Teacher Is Not the Best Teacher: Student-Centric Answer Selection
Zhengyu Hu | Zheyuan Xiao | Linxin Song | Fengqing Jiang | Yuetai Li | Zhihan Xiong | Junhao Lin | Yue Liu | Yao Su | Lijie Hu | Kaize Ding | Teng Xiao | Radha Poovendran
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhengyu Hu | Zheyuan Xiao | Linxin Song | Fengqing Jiang | Yuetai Li | Zhihan Xiong | Junhao Lin | Yue Liu | Yao Su | Lijie Hu | Kaize Ding | Teng Xiao | Radha Poovendran
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
LLM training increasingly relies on teacher-generated supervision, from synthetic responses to reasoning traces and tool-use demonstrations. Current practice often chooses the highest-performing teacher to generate student training data, implicitly treating teacher test performance as a proxy for teaching quality. We show that this assumption can fail: even when multiple teachers provide correct answers to the same question, the answer from the strongest teacher is not necessarily the best supervision for a given student. To address this gap, we propose Student-Centric Answer Sampling (SCAS), a framework that selects from verified teacher-generated answers according to their estimated student-centric learning cost. Motivated by a token-wise gradient decomposition, we derive an efficient forward-only proxy for this cost and use it to guide answer selection during training. Experiments across 30 teacher models, 6 student base models, and 8 tasks show that SCAS consistently improves student performance, suggesting that effective distillation should prioritize supervision matched to the current student rather than teacher strength alone.