Enhancing Cross-Tokenizer Knowledge Distillation with Contextual Dynamical Mapping

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Chen, Yijie, Liu, Yijin, Meng, Fandong, Chen, Yufeng, Xu, Jinan, Zhou, Jie
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Chen, Yijie
Liu, Yijin
Meng, Fandong
Chen, Yufeng
Xu, Jinan
Zhou, Jie
author_facet Chen, Yijie
Liu, Yijin
Meng, Fandong
Chen, Yufeng
Xu, Jinan
Zhou, Jie
contents Knowledge Distillation (KD) has emerged as a prominent technique for model compression. However, conventional KD approaches primarily focus on homogeneous architectures with identical tokenizers, constraining their applicability in cross-architecture scenarios. As for the cross-tokenizer KD, the differences in the tokenizers give rise to two fundamental challenges: (1) sequence misalignment caused by divergent tokenization strategies, and (2) mismatched vocabulary size and composition. While existing probability-matching methods attempt to address these issues, their efficacy remains limited due to suboptimal alignment in both the sequence and vocabulary aspects. To overcome these limitations, we propose Contextual Dynamic Mapping (CDM), a novel cross-tokenizer distillation framework that employs contextual information to enhance sequence alignment precision and dynamically improves vocabulary mapping. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach across five advanced and widely-used model families (i.e, LLama3, Phi3, Gemma2, OPT and Qwen2), which were configured into three distinct teacher-student pairs. Our method shows significant advantages over existing cross-tokenizer distillation baselines across diverse benchmarks, including instruction-following, code generation and math. Notably, our analysis reveals that combining conventional same-tokenizer distillation and cross-tokenizer distillation through CDM yields further performance improvements. The code is available at https://github.com/pppa2019/ContexualDynamicMapping
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_11104
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing Cross-Tokenizer Knowledge Distillation with Contextual Dynamical Mapping
Chen, Yijie
Liu, Yijin
Meng, Fandong
Chen, Yufeng
Xu, Jinan
Zhou, Jie
Computation and Language
Knowledge Distillation (KD) has emerged as a prominent technique for model compression. However, conventional KD approaches primarily focus on homogeneous architectures with identical tokenizers, constraining their applicability in cross-architecture scenarios. As for the cross-tokenizer KD, the differences in the tokenizers give rise to two fundamental challenges: (1) sequence misalignment caused by divergent tokenization strategies, and (2) mismatched vocabulary size and composition. While existing probability-matching methods attempt to address these issues, their efficacy remains limited due to suboptimal alignment in both the sequence and vocabulary aspects. To overcome these limitations, we propose Contextual Dynamic Mapping (CDM), a novel cross-tokenizer distillation framework that employs contextual information to enhance sequence alignment precision and dynamically improves vocabulary mapping. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach across five advanced and widely-used model families (i.e, LLama3, Phi3, Gemma2, OPT and Qwen2), which were configured into three distinct teacher-student pairs. Our method shows significant advantages over existing cross-tokenizer distillation baselines across diverse benchmarks, including instruction-following, code generation and math. Notably, our analysis reveals that combining conventional same-tokenizer distillation and cross-tokenizer distillation through CDM yields further performance improvements. The code is available at https://github.com/pppa2019/ContexualDynamicMapping
title Enhancing Cross-Tokenizer Knowledge Distillation with Contextual Dynamical Mapping
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11104