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Knowledge distillation transfers knowledge from large teacher models to smaller students for efficient inference. While existing methods primarily focus on distillation strategies, they often overlook the importance of enhancing teacher…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Xin Zhang , Jianyang Xu , Hao Peng , Dongjing Wang , Jingyuan Zheng , Yu Li , Yuyu Yin , Hongbo Wang

Distillation has shown remarkable success in transferring knowledge from a Large Language Model (LLM) teacher to a student LLM. However, current distillation methods require similar tokenizers between the teacher and the student,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Benjamin Minixhofer , Ivan Vulić , Edoardo Maria Ponti

In the era of large scale pretrained models, Knowledge Distillation (KD) serves an important role in transferring the wisdom of computationally heavy teacher models to lightweight, efficient student models while preserving performance.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Alex Wilf , Alex Tianyi Xu , Paul Pu Liang , Alexander Obolenskiy , Daniel Fried , Louis-Philippe Morency

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced various natural language processing tasks, but deploying them remains computationally expensive. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a promising solution, enabling the transfer of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Yuhang Zhou , Jing Zhu , Paiheng Xu , Xiaoyu Liu , Xiyao Wang , Danai Koutra , Wei Ai , Furong Huang

Growing efforts to improve knowledge distillation (KD) in large language models (LLMs) replace dense teacher supervision with selective distillation, which uses a subset of token positions, vocabulary classes, or training samples for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Almog Tavor , Itay Ebenspanger , Neil Cnaan , Mor Geva

Kullback-Leiber divergence has been widely used in Knowledge Distillation (KD) to compress Large Language Models (LLMs). Contrary to prior assertions that reverse Kullback-Leibler (RKL) divergence is mode-seeking and thus preferable over…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Taiqiang Wu , Chaofan Tao , Jiahao Wang , Runming Yang , Zhe Zhao , Ngai Wong

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges at inference time due to their high computational demands. To address this, we present Performance-Guided Knowledge Distillation (PGKD), a cost-effective and high-throughput solution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Flavio Di Palo , Prateek Singhi , Bilal Fadlallah

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the process of transferring knowledge from a large model to a small one. It has gained increasing attention in the natural language processing community, driven by the demands of compressing ever-growing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-31 Yuqiao Wen , Zichao Li , Wenyu Du , Lili Mou

Knowledge Distillation (KD) compresses large language models (LLMs) by transferring the teacher model's capabilities to a smaller student model, reducing inference cost and memory usage while maintaining performance. However, existing KD…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Lingyuan Liu , Mengxiang Zhang

Knowledge distillation (KD) is widely used for compressing a teacher model to a smaller student model, reducing its inference cost and memory footprint while preserving model capabilities. However, current KD methods for auto-regressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Jongwoo Ko , Sungnyun Kim , Tianyi Chen , Se-Young Yun

Knowledge distillation, transferring knowledge from a teacher model to a student model, has emerged as a powerful technique in neural machine translation for compressing models or simplifying training targets. Knowledge distillation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Jingxuan Wei , Linzhuang Sun , Yichong Leng , Xu Tan , Bihui Yu , Ruifeng Guo

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely adopted approach for compressing large neural networks by transferring knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model. In the context of large language models, token level KD,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Yihan Cao , Yanbin Kang , Zhengming Xing , Ruijie Jiang

Standard Knowledge Distillation (KD) compresses Large Language Models (LLMs) by optimizing final outputs, yet it typically treats the teacher's intermediate layer's thought process as a black box. While feature-based distillation attempts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Manish Dhakal , Uthman Jinadu , Anjila Budathoki , Rajshekhar Sunderraman , Yi Ding

Despite exciting progress in pre-training for visual-linguistic (VL) representations, very few aspire to a small VL model. In this paper, we study knowledge distillation (KD) to effectively compress a transformer-based large VL model into a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Zhiyuan Fang , Jianfeng Wang , Xiaowei Hu , Lijuan Wang , Yezhou Yang , Zicheng Liu

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique for transferring knowledge from complex teacher models to simpler student models, significantly enhancing model efficiency and accuracy. It has demonstrated substantial advancements in various…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Junjie Yang , Junhao Song , Xudong Han , Ziqian Bi , Tianyang Wang , Chia Xin Liang , Xinyuan Song , Yichao Zhang , Qian Niu , Benji Peng , Keyu Chen , Ming Liu

Reverse Kullback-Leibler (RKL) divergence has recently emerged as the preferred objective for large language model (LLM) distillation, consistently outperforming forward KL (FKL), particularly in regimes with large vocabularies and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Hoang-Chau Luong , Dat Ba Tran , Lingwei Chen

Tokenization is a foundational step in the text process of Large Language Models (LLMs). Texts must be first tokenized into token IDs, which are then input to LLMs. Inefficient tokenization results in long token-ID sequences and will slow…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Chong Li , Yingzhuo Deng , Wen Yang , Jiajun Zhang , Chengqing Zong

The widespread deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is hindered by the high computational demands, making knowledge distillation (KD) crucial for developing compact smaller ones. However, the conventional KD methods endure the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Zengkui Sun , Yijin Liu , Fandong Meng , Yufeng Chen , Jinan Xu , Jie Zhou

Large-scale language models have recently demonstrated impressive empirical performance. Nevertheless, the improved results are attained at the price of bigger models, more power consumption, and slower inference, which hinder their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Kevin J Liang , Weituo Hao , Dinghan Shen , Yufan Zhou , Weizhu Chen , Changyou Chen , Lawrence Carin

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a powerful paradigm for compressing large language models (LLMs), whose effectiveness depends on intertwined choices of divergence direction, optimization strategy, and data regime. We break down the design of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Wenhong Zhu , Ruobing Xie , Rui Wang , Pengfei Liu