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Main Authors: Song, Yuncheng, Ding, Liang, Zan, Changtong, Huang, Shujian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15303
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author Song, Yuncheng
Ding, Liang
Zan, Changtong
Huang, Shujian
author_facet Song, Yuncheng
Ding, Liang
Zan, Changtong
Huang, Shujian
contents Knowledge distillation (KD) has shown great promise in transferring knowledge from larger teacher models to smaller student models. However, existing KD strategies for large language models often minimize output distributions between student and teacher models indiscriminately for each token. This overlooks the imbalanced nature of tokens and their varying transfer difficulties. In response, we propose a distillation strategy called Self-Evolution KD. The core of this approach involves dynamically integrating teacher distribution and one-hot distribution of ground truth into the student distribution as prior knowledge, which promotes the distillation process. It adjusts the ratio of prior knowledge based on token learning difficulty, fully leveraging the teacher model's potential. Experimental results show our method brings an average improvement of approximately 1.4 SacreBLEU points across four translation directions in the WMT22 test sets. Further analysis indicates that the improvement comes from better knowledge transfer from teachers, confirming our hypothesis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_15303
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Self-Evolution Knowledge Distillation for LLM-based Machine Translation
Song, Yuncheng
Ding, Liang
Zan, Changtong
Huang, Shujian
Computation and Language
Knowledge distillation (KD) has shown great promise in transferring knowledge from larger teacher models to smaller student models. However, existing KD strategies for large language models often minimize output distributions between student and teacher models indiscriminately for each token. This overlooks the imbalanced nature of tokens and their varying transfer difficulties. In response, we propose a distillation strategy called Self-Evolution KD. The core of this approach involves dynamically integrating teacher distribution and one-hot distribution of ground truth into the student distribution as prior knowledge, which promotes the distillation process. It adjusts the ratio of prior knowledge based on token learning difficulty, fully leveraging the teacher model's potential. Experimental results show our method brings an average improvement of approximately 1.4 SacreBLEU points across four translation directions in the WMT22 test sets. Further analysis indicates that the improvement comes from better knowledge transfer from teachers, confirming our hypothesis.
title Self-Evolution Knowledge Distillation for LLM-based Machine Translation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15303