Small But Funny: A Feedback-Driven Approach to Humor Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ravi, Sahithya, Huber, Patrick, Shrivastava, Akshat, Sagar, Aditya, Aly, Ahmed, Shwartz, Vered, Einolghozati, Arash
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Ravi, Sahithya
Huber, Patrick
Shrivastava, Akshat
Sagar, Aditya
Aly, Ahmed
Shwartz, Vered
Einolghozati, Arash
author_facet Ravi, Sahithya
Huber, Patrick
Shrivastava, Akshat
Sagar, Aditya
Aly, Ahmed
Shwartz, Vered
Einolghozati, Arash
contents The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought to light promising language generation capabilities, particularly in performing tasks like complex reasoning and creative writing. Consequently, distillation through imitation of teacher responses has emerged as a popular technique to transfer knowledge from LLMs to more accessible, Small Language Models (SLMs). While this works well for simpler tasks, there is a substantial performance gap on tasks requiring intricate language comprehension and creativity, such as humor generation. We hypothesize that this gap may stem from the fact that creative tasks might be hard to learn by imitation alone and explore whether an approach, involving supplementary guidance from the teacher, could yield higher performance. To address this, we study the effect of assigning a dual role to the LLM - as a "teacher" generating data, as well as a "critic" evaluating the student's performance. Our experiments on humor generation reveal that the incorporation of feedback significantly narrows the performance gap between SLMs and their larger counterparts compared to merely relying on imitation. As a result, our research highlights the potential of using feedback as an additional dimension to data when transferring complex language abilities via distillation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_18113
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Small But Funny: A Feedback-Driven Approach to Humor Distillation
Ravi, Sahithya
Huber, Patrick
Shrivastava, Akshat
Sagar, Aditya
Aly, Ahmed
Shwartz, Vered
Einolghozati, Arash
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought to light promising language generation capabilities, particularly in performing tasks like complex reasoning and creative writing. Consequently, distillation through imitation of teacher responses has emerged as a popular technique to transfer knowledge from LLMs to more accessible, Small Language Models (SLMs). While this works well for simpler tasks, there is a substantial performance gap on tasks requiring intricate language comprehension and creativity, such as humor generation. We hypothesize that this gap may stem from the fact that creative tasks might be hard to learn by imitation alone and explore whether an approach, involving supplementary guidance from the teacher, could yield higher performance. To address this, we study the effect of assigning a dual role to the LLM - as a "teacher" generating data, as well as a "critic" evaluating the student's performance. Our experiments on humor generation reveal that the incorporation of feedback significantly narrows the performance gap between SLMs and their larger counterparts compared to merely relying on imitation. As a result, our research highlights the potential of using feedback as an additional dimension to data when transferring complex language abilities via distillation.
title Small But Funny: A Feedback-Driven Approach to Humor Distillation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18113