Enhancing Knowledge Distillation for LLMs with Response-Priming Prompting

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Goyal, Vijay, Khan, Mustafa, Tirupati, Aprameya, Saini, Harveer, Lam, Michael, Zhu, Kevin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Goyal, Vijay
Khan, Mustafa
Tirupati, Aprameya
Saini, Harveer
Lam, Michael
Zhu, Kevin
author_facet Goyal, Vijay
Khan, Mustafa
Tirupati, Aprameya
Saini, Harveer
Lam, Michael
Zhu, Kevin
contents Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, these models are often difficult to deploy due to significant computational requirements and resource constraints. Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective technique for transferring the performance of larger LLMs to smaller models. Traditional KD methods primarily focus on the direct output of the teacher model, with little emphasis on the role of prompting during knowledge transfer. In this paper, we propose a set of novel response-priming prompting strategies applied in the knowledge distillation pipeline to enhance the performance of student models. Our approach fine-tunes a smaller Llama 3.1 8B Instruct model by distilling knowledge from a quantized Llama 3.1 405B Instruct teacher model. We apply LoRA optimization and evaluate on the GSM8K benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that integrating reasoning-eliciting prompting into the proposed KD pipeline significantly improves student model performance, offering an efficient way to deploy powerful models in resource-constrained environments. We find that Ground Truth prompting results in a 55\% performance increase on GSM8K for a distilled Llama 3.1 8B Instruct compared to the same model distilled without prompting. A thorough investigation into the self-attention layers of the student models indicates that the more successful prompted models tend to exhibit certain positive behaviors inside their attention heads which can be tied to their increased accuracy. Our implementation can be found at https://github.com/alonso130r/knowledge-distillation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_17846
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing Knowledge Distillation for LLMs with Response-Priming Prompting
Goyal, Vijay
Khan, Mustafa
Tirupati, Aprameya
Saini, Harveer
Lam, Michael
Zhu, Kevin
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, these models are often difficult to deploy due to significant computational requirements and resource constraints. Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective technique for transferring the performance of larger LLMs to smaller models. Traditional KD methods primarily focus on the direct output of the teacher model, with little emphasis on the role of prompting during knowledge transfer. In this paper, we propose a set of novel response-priming prompting strategies applied in the knowledge distillation pipeline to enhance the performance of student models. Our approach fine-tunes a smaller Llama 3.1 8B Instruct model by distilling knowledge from a quantized Llama 3.1 405B Instruct teacher model. We apply LoRA optimization and evaluate on the GSM8K benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that integrating reasoning-eliciting prompting into the proposed KD pipeline significantly improves student model performance, offering an efficient way to deploy powerful models in resource-constrained environments. We find that Ground Truth prompting results in a 55\% performance increase on GSM8K for a distilled Llama 3.1 8B Instruct compared to the same model distilled without prompting. A thorough investigation into the self-attention layers of the student models indicates that the more successful prompted models tend to exhibit certain positive behaviors inside their attention heads which can be tied to their increased accuracy. Our implementation can be found at https://github.com/alonso130r/knowledge-distillation.
title Enhancing Knowledge Distillation for LLMs with Response-Priming Prompting
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17846