arXiv:2502.02671cs.LGcs.AI2025-02ICML被引 6

发现大模型蒸馏中存在教师欺骗现象,影响模型质量。

On Teacher Hacking in Language Model Distillation

  • 用真实分布、教师、学生三层结构验证蒸馏中的教师欺骗
  • 离线数据训练时出现教师欺骗,表现为收敛规律偏离多项式规律
  • 在线生成数据并提升数据多样性可有效防止欺骗

语言模型后训练通常分为两个阶段:(i) 知识蒸馏,即学生模型模仿更大的教师模型;(ii) 人类反馈强化学习(RLHF),通过优化奖励模型对齐模型。在第二阶段,存在奖励欺骗问题,即模型过度优化奖励模型,违背真实目标。本文研究知识蒸馏中是否存在类似现象,称为教师欺骗。由于教师模型本身是真实分布的不完美近似,可能引发此问题。为此,我们构建了包含真实分布(oracle LM)、由其蒸馏出的教师模型和由教师蒸馏的学生模型的受控实验框架。实验发现:使用固定离线数据集进行蒸馏时,教师欺骗确实发生,且可通过观察优化过程是否偏离多项式收敛规律来检测;而采用在线数据生成技术则能有效缓解该问题。关键因素在于数据多样性。本研究深化了对蒸馏机制在构建鲁棒高效语言模型中作用与局限的理解。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Post-training of language models (LMs) increasingly relies on the following two stages: (i) knowledge distillation, where the LM is trained to imitate a larger teacher LM, and (ii) reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where the LM is aligned by optimizing a reward model. In the second RLHF stage, a well-known challenge is reward hacking, where the LM over-optimizes the reward model. Such phenomenon is in line with Goodhart's law and can lead to degraded performance on the true objective. In this paper, we investigate whether a similar phenomenon, that we call teacher hacking, can occur during knowledge distillation. This could arise because the teacher LM is itself an imperfect approximation of the true distribution. To study this, we propose a controlled experimental setup involving: (i) an oracle LM representing the ground-truth distribution, (ii) a teacher LM distilled from the oracle, and (iii) a student LM distilled from the teacher. Our experiments reveal the following insights. When using a fixed offline dataset for distillation, teacher hacking occurs; moreover, we can detect it by observing when the optimization process deviates from polynomial convergence laws. In contrast, employing online data generation techniques effectively mitigates teacher hacking. More precisely, we identify data diversity as the key factor in preventing hacking. Overall, our findings provide a deeper understanding of the benefits and limitations of distillation for building robust and efficient LMs.

知识蒸馏模型对齐教师欺骗数据多样性

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