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The alignment of large language models (LLMs) often assumes that using more clean data yields better outcomes, overlooking the match between model capacity and example difficulty. Challenging this, we propose a new principle: Preference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Chengqian Gao , Haonan Li , Liu Liu , Zeke Xie , Peilin Zhao , Zhiqiang Xu

In real-world systems, models are frequently updated as more data becomes available, and in addition to achieving high accuracy, the goal is to also maintain a low difference in predictions compared to the base model (i.e. predictive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Heinrich Jiang , Harikrishna Narasimhan , Dara Bahri , Andrew Cotter , Afshin Rostamizadeh

Knowledge distillation aims to compress a powerful yet cumbersome teacher model into a lightweight student model without much sacrifice of performance. For this purpose, various approaches have been proposed over the past few years,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Defang Chen , Jian-Ping Mei , Hailin Zhang , Can Wang , Yan Feng , Chun Chen

Typical technique in knowledge distillation (KD) is regularizing the learning of a limited capacity model (student) by pushing its responses to match a powerful model's (teacher). Albeit useful especially in the penultimate layer and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-09-08 Ada Gorgun , Yeti Z. Gurbuz , A. Aydin Alatan

The push to compress and impart the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) into more deployable and efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) has benefited from improvements in knowledge distillation (KD) techniques. These techniques…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Shreyansh Padarha

Traditional knowledge distillation (KD) relies on a proficient teacher trained on the target task, which is not always available. In this setting, cross-task distillation can be used, enabling the use of any teacher model trained on a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Dylan Auty , Roy Miles , Benedikt Kolbeinsson , Krystian Mikolajczyk

Knowledge distillation (KD) is generally considered as a technique for performing model compression and learned-label smoothing. However, in this paper, we study and investigate the KD approach from a new perspective: we study its efficacy…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-07-01 Nandan Kumar Jha , Rajat Saini , Sparsh Mittal

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is an emerging LLM post-training paradigm in which the model serves as its own teacher: conditioned on privileged information such as a reference trace or hint, the same policy provides dense token-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Hongbin Zhang , Chaozheng Wang , Kehai Chen , Youcheng Pan , Yang Xiang , Jinpeng Wang , Min Zhang

In this paper, we propose that small models may not need to absorb the cost of pre-training to reap its benefits. Instead, they can capitalize on the astonishing results achieved by modern, enormous models to a surprising degree. We observe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Sean Farhat , Deming Chen

Deep learning networks are being developed in every stage of the MRI workflow and have provided state-of-the-art results. However, this has come at the cost of increased computation requirement and storage. Hence, replacing the networks…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-04-14 Balamurali Murugesan , Sricharan Vijayarangan , Kaushik Sarveswaran , Keerthi Ram , Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants have become the de facto standards for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences or specific goals. However, DPO requires high-quality preference data and suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Zhuotong Chen , Fang Liu , Jennifer Zhu , Wanyu Du , Yanjun Qi

The transfer of knowledge from one policy to another is an important tool in Deep Reinforcement Learning. This process, referred to as distillation, has been used to great success, for example, by enhancing the optimisation of agents,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, underpinning diverse AI applications. However, they often suffer from performance degradation due to factors such as catastrophic forgetting during Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Chi Liu , Xin Chen , Xu Zhou , Fangbo Tu , Srinivasan Manoharan

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a critical tool for training Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the majority of research focuses on approaches that rely solely on output logits, neglecting semantic information in the teacher's intermediate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Maxime Guigon , Lucas Dixon , Michaël E. Sander

Knowledge Distillation (KD) for Large Language Models (LLMs) has become increasingly important as models grow in size and complexity. While existing distillation approaches focus on imitating teacher behavior, they often overlook the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Yuang Cai , Yuyu Yuan

We introduce a low-resource safety enhancement method for aligning large language models (LLMs) without the need for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Our main idea is to exploit knowledge…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Haozheng Luo , Jiahao Yu , Wenxin Zhang , Jialong Li , Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu , Xinyu Xing , Han Liu

LLMs are increasingly explored for bundle generation, thanks to their reasoning capabilities and knowledge. However, deploying large-scale LLMs introduces significant efficiency challenges, primarily high computational costs during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Kaidong Feng , Zhu Sun , Jie Yang , Hui Fang , Xinghua Qu , Wenyuan Liu

Autonomous driving is an important and safety-critical task, and recent advances in LLMs/VLMs have opened new possibilities for reasoning and planning in this domain. However, large models demand substantial GPU memory and exhibit high…

Knowledge distillation is a mainstream algorithm in model compression by transferring knowledge from the larger model (teacher) to the smaller model (student) to improve the performance of student. Despite many efforts, existing methods…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Muhe Ding , Jianlong Wu , Xue Dong , Xiaojie Li , Pengda Qin , Tian Gan , Liqiang Nie

In learning-to-rank problems, a privileged feature is one that is available during model training, but not available at test time. Such features naturally arise in merchandised recommendation systems; for instance, "user clicked this item"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Shuo Yang , Sujay Sanghavi , Holakou Rahmanian , Jan Bakus , S. V. N. Vishwanathan