← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2611.11598 · v1
Perturbing Inputs Improves Pretraining Distillation
首次提交 2026-11-09 04:25
版本更新 2026-11-09 04:25
雷达观测 2026-11-10 13:19
摘要
Knowledge distillation trains a student language model to match a teacher's predictions on the training text. We ask whether learning the teacher's behavior beyond the training text can further improve the student. We investigate this using three input perturbations: additive token noise, blending two documents, and blending neighboring tokens. Specifically, for an early part of pretraining we perturb the inputs and train the student to match the teacher on them, and we spend the rest of the same token budget on ordinary distillation. When pretraining from scratch, the best method improves on standard distillation at both scales we tried, by 0.025 nats at 135M parameters and by 0.020 nats at 0.5B (mean of three seeds). At 135M this is 1.45 times the gain that distillation itself provides over next-token training. We also observe promising downstream transfer: at 0.5B, the best variant improves average zero-shot accuracy by about one percentage point across seven tasks. It also retains its validation-loss advantage after low-bit weight quantization. We also test a data-limited setting in which training data must be reused, and find that the gains persist. Finally, ablations suggest that, for additive noise, perturbing the teacher's inputs contributes most of the gain, while perturbing only the student's inputs yields much less.
作者备注：14 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables
观测到的版本
相邻记录可能跳过中间版本；首次发现 v2 及以上也会标为版本更新。
v1 · 2026-11-09 04:25 · 最新观测版本
Perturbing Inputs Improves Pretraining Distillation
Knowledge distillation trains a student language model to match a teacher's predictions on the training text. We ask whether learning the teacher's behavior beyond the training text can further improve the student. We investigate this using three input perturbations: additive token noise, blending two documents, and blending neighboring tokens. Specifically, for an early part of pretraining we perturb the inputs and train the student to match the teacher on them, and we spend the rest of the same token budget on ordinary distillation. When pretraining from scratch, the best method improves on standard distillation at both scales we tried, by 0.025 nats at 135M parameters and by 0.020 nats at 0.5B (mean of three seeds). At 135M this is 1.45 times the gain that distillation itself provides over next-token training. We also observe promising downstream transfer: at 0.5B, the best variant improves average zero-shot accuracy by about one percentage point across seven tasks. It also retains its validation-loss advantage after low-bit weight quantization. We also test a data-limited setting in which training data must be reused, and find that the gains persist. Finally, ablations suggest that, for additive noise, perturbing the teacher's inputs contributes most of the gain, while perturbing only the student's inputs yields much less.
查看此版本解读 →查看此版本原文 ↗