Pre-training Distillation for Large Language Models: A Design Space Exploration (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) aims to transfer knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model for model compression. |
| Approach: | They extend knowledge distillation to the pre-training phase of large language models . they first conduct an experiment using a teacher LLM to distill a 1.9B student LLM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to distill a 1.9B student model using a teacher LLM. |
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| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) aims to transfer knowledge from a teacher to a student . this tutorial will cover topics ranging from LLM sequence compression to LLM self-distillation . |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce intermediate-layer matching and prediction matching . they will then present advanced techniques such as reinforcement learning-based KD and multi-teacher distillation . |
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Dynamic Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods conduct knowledge distillation statically, e.g., student model aligns output distribution to teacher model on pre-defined training dataset. |
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On the Generalization vs Fidelity Paradox in Knowledge Distillation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) is a key technique for compressing large language models into smaller ones while preserving performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use knowledge distillation to compress large language models into smaller ones while preserving performance. |
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ReAugKD: Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Distillation For Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-short)
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Jianyi Zhang, Aashiq Muhamed, Aditya Anantharaman, Guoyin Wang, Changyou Chen, Kai Zhong, Qingjun Cui, Yi Xu, Belinda Zeng, Trishul Chilimbi, Yiran Chen
| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective compression technique to derive a smaller student model from a larger teacher model by transferring the knowledge embedded in the teacher's network. |
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive language models (LMs) are expensive and memory intensive, preventing the development of industrial applications. |
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Cost-effective Distillation of Large Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods require pretraining of the teacher on task-specific datasets, which can be costly for large and unstable for small datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to improve knowledge distillation by a loss-agnostic approach to task and model architecture. |
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GKD: A General Knowledge Distillation Framework for Large-scale Pre-trained Language Model (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation frameworks for language models are limited by memory and the use of complex distillation methods on larger-scale PLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a general knowledge distillation framework that supports distillation on larger-scale PLMs using various distillation methods. |
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Tutoring Helps Students Learn Better: Improving Knowledge Distillation for BERT with Tutor Network (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation approaches for language models have overlooked the difficulty of training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that controls difficulty of training examples during pre-training by a tutor network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art KD methods with student models on the GLUE benchmark. |
Dual-Space Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) have strong generalization abilities due to their huge model capacities. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-space knowledge distillation framework that unifies the output spaces of the two models for KD. |
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Self-Evolution Knowledge Distillation for LLM-based Machine Translation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation strategies for large language models minimize output distributions between student and teacher models indiscriminately for each token. |
| Approach: | They propose a distillation strategy that integrates teacher and one-hot distribution of ground truth into the student distribution as prior knowledge, which promotes the distillation process. |
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