@inproceedings{dasgupta-etal-2023-cost,
    title = "Cost-effective Distillation of Large Language Models",
    author = "Dasgupta, Sayantan  and
      Cohn, Trevor  and
      Baldwin, Timothy",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.463",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.463",
    pages = "7346--7354",
    abstract = "Knowledge distillation (KD) involves training a small {``}student{''} model to replicate the strong performance of a high-capacity {``}teacher{''} model, enabling efficient deployment in resource-constrained settings. Top-performing methods tend to be task- or architecture-specific and lack generalizability. Several existing approaches require pretraining of the teacher on task-specific datasets, which can be costly for large and unstable for small datasets. Here we propose an approach for improving KD through a novel distillation loss agnostic to the task and model architecture. We successfully apply our method to the distillation of the BERT-base and achieve highly competitive results from the distilled student across a range of GLUE tasks, especially for tasks with smaller datasets.",
}

Knowledge distillation (KD) involves training a small {``}student{''} model to replicate the strong performance of a high-capacity {``}teacher{''} model, enabling efficient deployment in resource-constrained settings. Top-performing methods tend to be task- or architecture-specific and lack generalizability. Several existing approaches require pretraining of the teacher on task-specific datasets, which can be costly for large and unstable for small datasets. Here we propose an approach for improving KD through a novel distillation loss agnostic to the task and model architecture. We successfully apply our method to the distillation of the BERT-base and achieve highly competitive results from the distilled student across a range of GLUE tasks, especially for tasks with smaller datasets.
Dasgupta, Sayantan Cohn, Trevor Baldwin, Timothy
Cost-effective Distillation of Large Language Models