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Main Authors: Boizard, Nicolas, Haddad, Kevin El, Hudelot, Céline, Colombo, Pierre
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12030
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author Boizard, Nicolas
Haddad, Kevin El
Hudelot, Céline
Colombo, Pierre
author_facet Boizard, Nicolas
Haddad, Kevin El
Hudelot, Céline
Colombo, Pierre
contents Deploying large language models (LLMs) of several billion parameters can be impractical in most industrial use cases due to constraints such as cost, latency limitations, and hardware accessibility. Knowledge distillation (KD) offers a solution by compressing knowledge from resource-intensive large models to smaller ones. Various strategies exist, some relying on the text generated by the teacher model and optionally utilizing his logits to enhance learning. However, these methods based on logits often require both teacher and student models to share the same tokenizer, limiting their applicability across different LLM families. In this paper, we introduce Universal Logit Distillation (ULD) loss, grounded in optimal transport, to address this limitation. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ULD loss in enabling distillation across models with different architectures and tokenizers, paving the way to a more widespread use of distillation techniques.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_12030
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Cross-Tokenizer Distillation: the Universal Logit Distillation Loss for LLMs
Boizard, Nicolas
Haddad, Kevin El
Hudelot, Céline
Colombo, Pierre
Computation and Language
Deploying large language models (LLMs) of several billion parameters can be impractical in most industrial use cases due to constraints such as cost, latency limitations, and hardware accessibility. Knowledge distillation (KD) offers a solution by compressing knowledge from resource-intensive large models to smaller ones. Various strategies exist, some relying on the text generated by the teacher model and optionally utilizing his logits to enhance learning. However, these methods based on logits often require both teacher and student models to share the same tokenizer, limiting their applicability across different LLM families. In this paper, we introduce Universal Logit Distillation (ULD) loss, grounded in optimal transport, to address this limitation. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ULD loss in enabling distillation across models with different architectures and tokenizers, paving the way to a more widespread use of distillation techniques.
title Towards Cross-Tokenizer Distillation: the Universal Logit Distillation Loss for LLMs
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12030