Bridging the Gap between Decision and Logits in Decision-based Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models

Qinhong Zhou, Zonghan Yang, Peng Li, Yang Liu

Main: Machine Learning for NLP Main-oral Paper

Session 2: Machine Learning for NLP (Oral)
Conference Room: Metropolitan Centre
Conference Time: July 10, 14:00-15:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Session 2 (18:00-19:30 UTC)
Keywords: model compression methods
TLDR: Conventional knowledge distillation (KD) methods require access to the internal information of teachers, e.g., logits. However, such information may not always be accessible for large pre-trained language models (PLMs). In this work, we focus on decision-based KD for PLMs, where only teacher decisio...
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Abstract: Conventional knowledge distillation (KD) methods require access to the internal information of teachers, e.g., logits. However, such information may not always be accessible for large pre-trained language models (PLMs). In this work, we focus on decision-based KD for PLMs, where only teacher decisions (i.e., top-1 labels) are accessible. Considering the information gap between logits and decisions, we propose a novel method to estimate logits from the decision distributions. Specifically, decision distributions can be both derived as a function of logits theoretically and estimated with test-time data augmentation empirically. By combining the theoretical and empirical estimations of the decision distributions together, the estimation of logits can be successfully reduced to a simple root-finding problem. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms strong baselines on both natural language understanding and machine reading comprehension datasets.