Staged Knowledge Distillation Through Least-to-Most Prompting: Optimizing Teacher Guidance via Difficulty-Aware Training (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) enables the compression of large language models (LLMs) conventional methods suffer from training-inference mismatches and suboptimal performance due to expensive student-generated outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines a CL strategy and adaptive loss design to reduce training mismatches and suboptimal performance. |
| Outcome: | L2M-KD outperforms existing white-box KD methods on instruction-following tasks . it outperformed existing methods, achieving superior student model performance with reduced overhead . |
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Revisiting Knowledge Distillation for Autoregressive Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive language models (LMs) are expensive and memory intensive, preventing the development of industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive teaching approach to improve the KD of autoregressive language models by distilling knowledge into a small student model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve consistent and significant performance gains across all model types and sizes. |
Calibrated Progressive Distillation: Co-Designing Curriculum and Target Mixing for Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge distillation address the teacher–student capacity gap by mixing teacher and student distributions in the distillation target or using curriculum learning to sequence training from easy to hard examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a white-box KD framework that co-designs curriculum scheduling and target mixing through a unified difficulty-aware principle. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods while reducing training runtime by over 10%. |
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. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique improves the performance of smaller models by 10% while providing only marginal benefits for larger models. |
PromptKD: Distilling Student-Friendly Knowledge for Generative Language Models via Prompt Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have raised concerns about inference costs, increasing the need for research into model compression. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes prompt tuning to enable generative language models to transfer student-friendly knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on instruction-following datasets show that PromptKD achieves state-of-the-art performance while adding only 0.0007% of the teacher’s parameters as prompts. |
Sparse Logit Sampling: Accelerating Knowledge Distillation in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Anshumann Anshumann, Mohd Abbas Zaidi, Akhil Kedia, Jinwoo Ahn, Taehwak Kwon, Kangwook Lee, Haejun Lee, Joohyung Lee
| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation is a cost-effective technique to distill knowledge in Large Language Models, if the teacher output logits can be pre-computed and cached. |
| Approach: | They propose an importance-sampling-based method which provides unbiased estimates, preserves the gradient in expectation, and requires storing significantly sparser logits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables faster training of student models with marginal overhead (10%) compared to cross-entropy based training, while maintaining competitive performance compared with full distillation. |
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. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework and loss function that preserves the semantic similarities of teacher and student training examples to enable the student to retrieve from the knowledge base effectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves the semantic similarities of teacher and student training examples to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the GLUE benchmark. |
Towards Zero-Shot Knowledge Distillation for Natural Language Processing (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) is a common knowledge transfer algorithm used for model compression across a variety of deep learning based natural language processing (NLP) solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use teacher training data for model compression . they investigate six tasks and find they can achieve between 75% and 92% of the teacher’s classification score while compressing the model 30 times. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution achieves between 75% and 92% of the teacher’s classification score while compressing the model 30 times. |
Performance-Guided LLM Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Text Classification at Scale (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) face high computational demands at inference time due to high computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a cost-effective and high-throughput solution for large language models . PGKD distills the knowledge of LLMs into smaller, task-specific models based on teacher-student knowledge distillation . |
| Outcome: | PGKD outperforms BERT-based models and other knowledge distillation methods on multi-class classification datasets. |
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. |
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. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive results across a range of tasks, especially for tasks with smaller datasets. |