Revisiting Intermediate Layer Distillation for Compressing Language Models: An Overfitting Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a highly promising method for mitigating the computational problems of pre-trained language models (PLMs).Among various KD approaches, Intermediate Layer Distillation (ILD) has been a de facto standard KD method with its performance efficacy in the NLP field.In this paper, we find that existing ILD methods are prone to overfitting to training datasets, although these methods transfer more information than the original KD.Next, we present the simple observations to mitigate the overfitting of ILD: distilling only the last Transformer layer and conducting ILD on supplementary tasks.Based on our two findings, we propose a simple yet effective consistency-regularized ILD (CR-ILD), which prevents the student model from overfitting the training dataset.Substantial experiments on distilling BERT on the GLUE benchmark and several synthetic datasets demonstrate that our proposed ILD method outperforms other KD techniques.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".