A Study on Knowledge Distillation from Weak Teacher for Scaling Up Pre-trained Language Models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Distillation from Weak Teacher (DWT) is a method of transferring knowledge from a smaller, weaker teacher model to a larger student model to improve its performance. Previous studies have shown that DWT can be effective in the vision domain and natural language processing (NLP) pre-training stage. Specifically, DWT shows promise in practical scenarios, such as enhancing new generation or larger models using pre-trained yet older or smaller models and lacking a resource budget. However, the optimal conditions for using DWT have yet to be fully investigated in NLP pre-training. Therefore, this study examines three key factors to optimize DWT, distinct from those used in the vision domain or traditional knowledge distillation. These factors are:(i) the impact of teacher model quality on DWT effectiveness, (ii) guidelines for adjusting the weighting value for DWT loss, and (iii) the impact of parameter remapping as a student model initialization technique for DWT.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".