In computational optical imaging and wireless communications, signals are acquired through linear coded and noisy projections, which are recovered through computational algorithms. Deep model-based approaches, i.e., neural networks incorporating the sensing operators, are the state-of-the-art for signal recovery. However, these methods require exact knowledge of the sensing operator, which is often unavailable in practice, leading to performance degradation. Consequently, we propose a new recovery paradigm based on knowledge distillation. A teacher model, trained with full or almost exact knowledge of a synthetic sensing operator, guides a student model with an inexact real sensing operator. The teacher is interpreted as a relaxation of the student since it solves a problem with fewer constraints, which can guide the student to achieve higher performance. We demonstrate the improvement of signal reconstruction in computational optical imaging for single-pixel imaging with miscalibrated coded apertures systems and multiple-input multiple-output symbols detection with inexact channel matrix.