arXiv AI

Efficient Knowledge Distillation for LLMs: Offline Top-K Logits and a Fused Chunked KL Loss

arXiv:2608. 03796v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small language models are often the only option for deployment under tight latency, cost, and on-premises constraints, but they are rarely trained from scratch: a compressed model is usually recovered through knowledge distillation (KD).

arXiv AI
Jun 19

StreamKL: Fast and Memory-Efficient KL Divergence for Boosting Attention Distillation

arXiv:2606. 20005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention distillation, which trains one attention distribution to match another by minimizing their Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, is widely used in knowledge distillation, model compression, continual learning, and sparse-attention LLM training.

By Guangda Liu, Yiquan Wang, Chengwei Li, Wenhao Chen, Jing Lin, Yiwu Yao, Danning Ke, Wenchao Ding, Jieru Zhao
arXiv AI
Jul 16

ShortOPD: Recovering Pruned LLMs with Short-to-Long On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2607. 13124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Structured pruning is a hardware-friendly way to compress LLMs, but it is mostly validated on multiple-choice recognition tasks, while the same compressed checkpoints can collapse on the free-form generation that deployment actually requires.

By Qingyu Zhang, Qianhao Yuan, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Xiang Li, Ming Xu, Jiarui Li, Xiuyin Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Tevatron Meets Megatron: Expert-Parallel LLM Reranker Training on an Academic Budget

arXiv:2608. 00916v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern reranking recipes---billion-scale cross-encoders, mixture-of-experts (MoE) backbones, and distillation against strong teachers---have outpaced the training infrastructure available to most academic groups.

By Zhichao Xu, Xueguang Ma, Shengyao Zhuang, Luyu Gao, Wenqian Ye, Yu Wang, Jamie Callan, Jimmy Lin