arXiv:2507.10155cs.CL2025-07被引 1

提出从功能几何角度优化大模型知识蒸馏,提升学生模型性能。

What Should Feature Distillation Transfer in LLMs? A Task-Tangent Geometry View

  • 以教师模型输出与内部表征的关系为依据,而非直接对齐特征。
  • 仅保留对任务贡献大的功能方向,实现高效低维知识迁移。
  • 无需参数调整,适配不同架构,在维度不匹配时表现更优。

基于特征的知识蒸馏旨在将教师大模型的中间表示传递给学生模型。现有方法通常依赖直接特征匹配或学习投影,隐含假设表征具有内在意义。然而,表征维度的相关性仅取决于其对模型输出的影响。本文提出一种功能视角的特征蒸馏方法,从教师模型的功能几何出发——即其输出如何依赖于内部表征——而非直接对齐表征。该视角表明,有效的蒸馏无需保留全部高维特征,只需保留主导的功能贡献方向,自然导出每项任务的有效功能维度。基于此框架,我们提出Flex-KD,一种架构无关且无参数的蒸馏方法,可在匹配学生模型表征能力的同时传递教师的功能几何。在语言理解与生成基准上的大量实验表明,Flex-KD持续优于现有蒸馏方法,尤其在教师与学生维度严重不匹配时表现更佳。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Feature-based knowledge distillation aims to transfer intermediate representations from a teacher LLM model to a student. Existing approaches typically rely on direct feature matching or learned projections, implicitly treating representations as objects with intrinsic meaning. However, the relevance of a representation dimension is determined solely by how it affects the model's output. In this work, we propose a functional perspective on feature-based distillation. We characterize knowledge transfer in terms of the teacher's functional geometry, i.e., how its output depends on internal representations, rather than direct representation alignment. This viewpoint reveals that effective distillation need not preserve full high-dimensional features, but instead should retain dominant directions of functional contribution, naturally inducing an effective functional dimension for each task. Building on this framework, we introduce Flex-KD, an architecture-agnostic and parameter-free distillation method that transfers the teacher's functional geometry while matching the student's representational capacity. Extensive experiments across language understanding and generation benchmarks demonstrate that Flex-KD consistently outperforms existing distillation approaches, particularly under severe teacher-student dimension mismatch.

知识蒸馏大模型压缩功能几何模型效率

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