MiniDisc: Minimal Distillation Schedule for Language Model Compression

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Chen, Yang, Yang, Wang, Qifan, Liu, Jiahao, Wang, Jingang, Wu, Wei, Song, Dawei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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_version_ 1866917576291909632
author Zhang, Chen
Yang, Yang
Wang, Qifan
Liu, Jiahao
Wang, Jingang
Wu, Wei
Song, Dawei
author_facet Zhang, Chen
Yang, Yang
Wang, Qifan
Liu, Jiahao
Wang, Jingang
Wu, Wei
Song, Dawei
contents Recent studies have uncovered that language model distillation is less effective when facing a large capacity gap between the teacher and the student, and introduced teacher assistant-based distillation to bridge the gap. As a connection, the scale and the performance of the teacher assistant is of vital importance to bring the knowledge from the teacher to the student. However, existing teacher assistant-based methods require maximally many trials before scheduling an optimal teacher assistant. To this end, we propose a minimal distillation schedule (MiniDisc) for scheduling the optimal teacher assistant in minimally one trial. In particular, motivated by the finding that the performance of the student is positively correlated to the scale-performance tradeoff of the teacher assistant, MiniDisc is designed with a $λ$-tradeoff to measure the optimality of the teacher assistant without trial distillation to the student. MiniDisc then can schedule the optimal teacher assistant with the best $λ$-tradeoff in a sandwich framework. MiniDisc is evaluated with an extensive set of experiments on GLUE. Experimental results demonstrate the improved efficiency our MiniDisc compared to several state-of-the-art baselines. We further apply MiniDisc to a language model with billions of parameters and show its scalability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2205_14570
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MiniDisc: Minimal Distillation Schedule for Language Model Compression
Zhang, Chen
Yang, Yang
Wang, Qifan
Liu, Jiahao
Wang, Jingang
Wu, Wei
Song, Dawei
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Recent studies have uncovered that language model distillation is less effective when facing a large capacity gap between the teacher and the student, and introduced teacher assistant-based distillation to bridge the gap. As a connection, the scale and the performance of the teacher assistant is of vital importance to bring the knowledge from the teacher to the student. However, existing teacher assistant-based methods require maximally many trials before scheduling an optimal teacher assistant. To this end, we propose a minimal distillation schedule (MiniDisc) for scheduling the optimal teacher assistant in minimally one trial. In particular, motivated by the finding that the performance of the student is positively correlated to the scale-performance tradeoff of the teacher assistant, MiniDisc is designed with a $λ$-tradeoff to measure the optimality of the teacher assistant without trial distillation to the student. MiniDisc then can schedule the optimal teacher assistant with the best $λ$-tradeoff in a sandwich framework. MiniDisc is evaluated with an extensive set of experiments on GLUE. Experimental results demonstrate the improved efficiency our MiniDisc compared to several state-of-the-art baselines. We further apply MiniDisc to a language model with billions of parameters and show its scalability.
title MiniDisc: Minimal Distillation Schedule for Language Model Compression
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14570