MiniLLM: On-Policy Distillation of Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Gu, Yuxian, Dong, Li, Wei, Furu, Huang, Minlie
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Gu, Yuxian
Dong, Li
Wei, Furu
Huang, Minlie
author_facet Gu, Yuxian
Dong, Li
Wei, Furu
Huang, Minlie
contents Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a promising technique for reducing the high computational demand of large language models (LLMs). However, previous KD methods are primarily applied to white-box classification models or training small models to imitate black-box model APIs like ChatGPT. How to effectively distill the knowledge of white-box LLMs into small models is still under-explored, which becomes more important with the prosperity of open-source LLMs. In this work, we propose a KD approach that distills LLMs into smaller language models. We first replace the forward Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) objective in the standard KD approaches with reverse KLD, which is more suitable for KD on generative language models, to prevent the student model from overestimating the low-probability regions of the teacher distribution. Then, we derive an effective on-policy optimization approach to learn this objective. The student models are named MiniLLM. Extensive experiments in the instruction-following setting show that MiniLLM generates more precise responses with higher overall quality, lower exposure bias, better calibration, and higher long-text generation performance than the baselines. Our method is scalable for different model families with 120M to 13B parameters. Our code, data, and model checkpoints can be found in https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps/tree/main/minillm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_08543
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MiniLLM: On-Policy Distillation of Large Language Models
Gu, Yuxian
Dong, Li
Wei, Furu
Huang, Minlie
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a promising technique for reducing the high computational demand of large language models (LLMs). However, previous KD methods are primarily applied to white-box classification models or training small models to imitate black-box model APIs like ChatGPT. How to effectively distill the knowledge of white-box LLMs into small models is still under-explored, which becomes more important with the prosperity of open-source LLMs. In this work, we propose a KD approach that distills LLMs into smaller language models. We first replace the forward Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) objective in the standard KD approaches with reverse KLD, which is more suitable for KD on generative language models, to prevent the student model from overestimating the low-probability regions of the teacher distribution. Then, we derive an effective on-policy optimization approach to learn this objective. The student models are named MiniLLM. Extensive experiments in the instruction-following setting show that MiniLLM generates more precise responses with higher overall quality, lower exposure bias, better calibration, and higher long-text generation performance than the baselines. Our method is scalable for different model families with 120M to 13B parameters. Our code, data, and model checkpoints can be found in https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps/tree/main/minillm.
title MiniLLM: On-Policy Distillation of Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08543