Knowledge distillation (KD) is a common approach to compress a teacher model to reduce its inference cost and memory footprint, by training a smaller student model. However, in the context of autoregressive language models (LMs), we empirically find that larger teacher LMs might dramatically result in a poorer student. In response to this problem, we conduct a series of analyses and reveal that different tokens have different teaching modes, neglecting which will lead to performance degradation. Motivated by this, we propose a simple yet effective adaptive teaching approach (ATKD) to improve the KD. The core of ATKD is to reduce rote learning and make teaching more diverse and flexible. Extensive experiments on 8 LM tasks show that, with the help of ATKD, various baseline KD methods can achieve consistent and significant performance gains (up to +3.04% average score) across all model types and sizes. More encouragingly, ATKD can improve the student model generalization effectively.
@article{arxiv.2402.11890,
title = {Revisiting Knowledge Distillation for Autoregressive Language Models},
author = {Qihuang Zhong and Liang Ding and Li Shen and Juhua Liu and Bo Du and Dacheng Tao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.11890},
year = {2024}
}