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Several recent studies have elucidated why knowledge distillation (KD) improves model performance. However, few have researched the other advantages of KD in addition to its improving model performance. In this study, we have attempted to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Hyeongrok Han , Siwon Kim , Hyun-Soo Choi , Sungroh Yoon

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a standard route to compress Large Language Models (LLMs) into compact students, yet most pipelines uniformly apply token-wise loss regardless of teacher confidence. This indiscriminate supervision amplifies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Haiduo Huang , Jiangcheng Song , Yadong Zhang , Pengju Ren

Large language models (LLMs) excel in complex reasoning tasks, and distilling their reasoning capabilities into smaller models has shown promise. However, we uncover an interesting phenomenon, which we term the Small Model Learnability Gap:…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Yuetai Li , Xiang Yue , Zhangchen Xu , Fengqing Jiang , Luyao Niu , Bill Yuchen Lin , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran

The improvement in the performance of efficient and lightweight models (i.e., the student model) is achieved through knowledge distillation (KD), which involves transferring knowledge from more complex models (i.e., the teacher model).…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Seonghak Kim , Gyeongdo Ham , Yucheol Cho , Daeshik Kim

Knowledge Distillation (KD) aims at improving the performance of a low-capacity student model by inheriting knowledge from a high-capacity teacher model. Previous KD methods typically train a student by minimizing a task-related loss and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Mengya Gao , Yujun Shen , Quanquan Li , Junjie Yan , Liang Wan , Dahua Lin , Chen Change Loy , Xiaoou Tang

Reward models (RMs) play a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Due to the difficulty of obtaining high-quality human preference annotations, distilling preferences from generative LLMs has emerged…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Hongli Zhou , Hui Huang , Wei Liu , Chenglong Wang , Xingyuan Bu , Lvyuan Han , Fuhai Song , Muyun Yang , Wenhao Jiang , Hailong Cao , Tiejun Zhao

Knowledge Distillation (KD) compresses computationally expensive pre-trained language models (PLMs) by transferring their knowledge to smaller models, allowing their use in resource-constrained or real-time settings. However, most smaller…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Hayeon Lee , Rui Hou , Jongpil Kim , Davis Liang , Hongbo Zhang , Sung Ju Hwang , Alexander Min

The emergence of Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) has advanced Speech Emotion Recognition (SER), but their size limits deployment in resource-constrained environments. While Knowledge Distillation is effective for LALM compression,…

Knowledge distillation (KD) has become a powerful tool for training compact student models using larger, pretrained teacher models, often requiring less data and computational resources. Teacher models typically possess more layers and thus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Edvin Fasth , Sagar Singh

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 involves transferring knowledge from large, cumbersome teacher models to more compact student models. The standard approach minimizes the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the probabilistic outputs of a teacher…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Nikolaos Giakoumoglou , Tania Stathaki

Knowledge distillation is an effective technique for pre-trained language model compression. However, existing methods only focus on the knowledge distribution among layers, which may cause the loss of fine-grained information in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Zihe Liu , Yulong Mao , Jinan Xu , Xinrui Peng , Kaiyu Huang

Recent recommender systems have shown remarkable performance by using an ensemble of heterogeneous models. However, it is exceedingly costly because it requires resources and inference latency proportional to the number of models, which…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-03-03 SeongKu Kang , Wonbin Kweon , Dongha Lee , Jianxun Lian , Xing Xie , Hwanjo Yu

Recently, efficient Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have gained significant attention as a solution to their high computational complexity, making them more practical for real-world applications. In this regard, the knowledge…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Jiwan Kim , Kibum Kim , Sangwoo Seo , Chanyoung Park

Intermediate layer knowledge distillation (KD) can improve the standard KD technique (which only targets the output of teacher and student models) especially over large pre-trained language models. However, intermediate layer distillation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Md Akmal Haidar , Nithin Anchuri , Mehdi Rezagholizadeh , Abbas Ghaddar , Philippe Langlais , Pascal Poupart

Knowledge distillation aims to transfer knowledge to the student model by utilizing the predictions/features of the teacher model, and feature-based distillation has recently shown its superiority over logit-based distillation. However, due…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Shuoxi Zhang , Hanpeng Liu , John E. Hopcroft , Kun He

Reasoning distillation aims to transfer multi-step reasoning capabilities from large language models to smaller, more efficient ones. While recent methods have shown promising gains, they typically rely on static teacher-student hierarchies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Khouloud Saadi , Di Wang

Distribution matching distillation (DMD) facilitates few-step image generation by aligning a distilled student with a reference multi-step teacher. In practice, however, optimizing DMD can reduce sample diversity in few-step synthesis, and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Tianhe Wu , Ruibin Li , Lei Zhang , Kede Ma

Conventional knowledge distillation (KD) approaches are designed for the student model to predict similar output as the teacher model for each sample. Unfortunately, the relationship across samples with same class is often neglected. In…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Jinjing Zhu , Songze Li , Lin Wang

Diffusion distillation, exemplified by Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), has shown great promise in few-step generation but often sacrifices quality for sampling speed. While integrating Reinforcement Learning (RL) into distillation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Linwei Dong , Ruoyu Guo , Ge Bai , Zehuan Yuan , Yawei Luo , Changqing Zou