arXiv:2511.02833cs.LGcs.CL2025-11被引 4

提出GRACE评分,一键选出最适合学生的教师模型。

In Good GRACEs: Principled Teacher Selection for Knowledge Distillation

  • 基于学生梯度分布设计轻量评分,无需测试数据或教师内部信息
  • 在GSM8K和MATH上与学生表现相关性达86%,提升最高7.4%
  • 可指导温度、教师选型等关键训练决策,适合高效模型蒸馏场景

知识蒸馏通过大模型生成数据来训练小模型,但选择最优教师需大量试错。本文提出轻量级评分GRACE,衡量教师对特定学生任务的适配性。GRACE仅依赖学生梯度的分布特性,无需验证集、教师输出或内部结构。从信息论角度,其与梯度算法的留一稳定性相关,影响蒸馏后学生的泛化能力。在GSM8K和MATH数据集上,GRACE与LLaMA和OLMo学生模型性能的相关性高达86%(斯皮尔曼相关系数)。使用GRACE选中的教师,可使学生性能相比盲目选择最优教师提升最多7.4%。此外,GRACE还能指导蒸馏中的关键设计:最佳生成温度、受限规模下的最优教师选择,以及同模型族内的优选。结果表明,GRACE能高效精准地识别兼容教师,并提供细粒度蒸馏指导。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Knowledge distillation is an efficient strategy to use data generated by large "teacher" language models to train smaller capable "student" models, but selecting the optimal teacher for a specific student-task combination requires expensive trial-and-error. We propose a lightweight score called GRACE to quantify how effective a teacher will be for post-training a student model. GRACE measures distributional properties of the student's gradients without access to a verifier, teacher logits, teacher internals, or test data. From an information-theoretic perspective, GRACE connects to leave-one-out stability of gradient-based algorithms, which controls the generalization performance of the distilled students. On GSM8K and MATH, GRACE correlates strongly (up to 86% Spearman correlation) with the performance of the distilled LLaMA and OLMo students. In particular, training a student using the GRACE-selected teacher can improve the performance by up to 7.4% over naively using the best-performing teacher. Further, GRACE can provide guidance on crucial design choices in distillation, including (1) the best temperature to use when generating from the teacher, (2) the best teacher to use given a size constraint, and (3) the best teacher to use within a specific model family. Altogether, our findings demonstrate that GRACE can efficiently and effectively identify a strongly compatible teacher for a given student and provide fine-grained guidance on how to perform distillation.

知识蒸馏教师选择模型压缩评估指标

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