Related papers: Prompt-Level Distillation: A Non-Parametric Altern…

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 (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…

Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging because they are memory inefficient and compute-intensive for practical applications. In reaction, researchers train smaller task-specific models by either finetuning with human labels…

Standard knowledge distillation for autoregressive models often suffers from distribution mismatch. While on-policy methods mitigate this by leveraging student-generated outputs, they rely on computationally expensive Reinforcement Learning…

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various NLP tasks. However, traditional fine-tuning methods for leveraging PLMs for downstream tasks entail significant computational overhead. Prompt-tuning has…

We study {on-policy self-distillation} (OPSD), where a language model improves its reasoning ability by distilling privileged teacher distributions along its own on-policy trajectories. Despite the performance gains of OPSD, we identify a…

Prompt learning is an effective way to exploit the potential of large-scale pre-trained foundational models. Continuous prompts parameterize context tokens in prompts by turning them into differentiable vectors. Deep continuous prompts…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become a central engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains the dominant…

In the past year, distillation has seen a renewed prominence in large language model (LLM) pretraining, exemplified by the Llama-3.2 and Gemma model families. While distillation has historically been shown to improve statistical modeling,…

Can post-trained large language models (LLMs) further improve themselves using only unlabeled prompts, without external teachers or feedback from tools? We study this setting starting only from unlabeled seed questions with no ground-truth…

Knowledge distillation is an effective technique for pre-trained language model compression. Although existing knowledge distillation methods perform well for the most typical model BERT, they could be further improved in two aspects: the…

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for code understanding. However, deploying these PLMs in large-scale applications faces practical challenges due to their computational intensity and inference latency.…

Continual learning (CL) aims to learn new tasks without erasing previous knowledge. However, current CL methods primarily emphasize improving accuracy while often neglecting training efficiency, which consequently restricts their practical…

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has transformed prompt engineering from a localized craft into a systems-level governance challenge. As models scale and update across generations, prompt behavior becomes sensitive to…

Derivative-free prompt learning has emerged as a lightweight alternative to prompt tuning, which only requires model inference to optimize the prompts. However, existing work did not take full advantage of the over-parameterized…

In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models (LLMs) to solve novel tasks without weight updates. Despite its empirical success, the mechanism behind ICL remains poorly understood, limiting our ability to interpret, improve, and…

Knowledge distillation is an effective way to transfer knowledge from a strong teacher to an efficient student model. Ideally, we expect the better the teacher is, the better the student. However, this expectation does not always come true.…

Language models (LMs) trained on vast quantities of unlabelled data have greatly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP). In this study, we re-visit the widely accepted notion in NLP that continued pre-training LMs on…

Knowledge distillation is a model compression technique in which a compact "student" network is trained to replicate the predictive behavior of a larger "teacher" network. In logit-based knowledge distillation, it has become the de facto…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting often improves classification accuracy, but it introduces a significant throughput penalty with rationale generation (Wei et al., 2022; Cheng and Van Durme, 2024). To resolve this trade-off, we introduce…