神经网络压缩有几何极限,特征容量由稀疏性决定。
Geometric Limits of Knowledge Distillation: A Minimum-Width Theorem via Superposition Theory
- 用超叠加理论分析知识蒸馏的特征编码上限
- 学生模型宽度决定最大可存特征数,超过则永久丢失
- 适合研究模型压缩与表示几何的学者参考
知识蒸馏将大模型压缩为小模型时,性能会达到一个无法突破的损失下限,且该现象在不同训练方法中均存在。我们提出该下限具有几何本质:神经网络通过超叠加机制,在远超维度数的范围内表示特征;学生模型宽度为 $d_S$ 时,最多能编码 $d_S imes g(α)$ 个特征,其中 $g(α) = 1/((1-α)\ ext{ln}\frac{1}{1-α})$ 为依赖稀疏性的容量函数。超出该预算的特征将永久丢失,导致重要性加权的损失下限。我们在一个小型模型(48种配置,中位准确率>93%)和 Pythia-410M 上验证,稀疏自编码器测得 $F \approx 28,700$ 个特征,稀疏度 $α \approx 0.992$,临界宽度 $d_S^* \approx 1,065$。五种学生宽度的蒸馏结果证实了预测的单调下限排序。观测到的下限可分解为几何成分与与宽度无关的架构基线($R^2 = 0.993$)。线性探测显示,即使丢失88%特征,粗粒度概念仍保留,表明下限源于重要性分布长尾中细粒度特征的累积损失。本研究将表示几何与蒸馏极限联系起来,并提供仅基于 SAE 测量预测蒸馏性能的实用工具。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Knowledge distillation compresses large teachers into smaller students, but performance saturates at a loss floor that persists across training methods and objectives. We argue this floor is geometric: neural networks represent far more features than dimensions through superposition, and a student of width $d_S$ can encode at most $d_S \cdot g(α)$ features, where $g(α) = 1/((1-α)\ln\frac{1}{1-α})$ is a sparsity-dependent capacity function. Features beyond this budget are permanently lost, yielding an importance-weighted loss floor. We validate on a toy model (48 configurations, median accuracy >93%) and on Pythia-410M, where sparse autoencoders measure $F \approx 28{,}700$ features at $α\approx 0.992$ (critical width $d_S^* \approx 1{,}065$). Distillation into five student widths confirms the predicted monotonic floor ordering. The observed floor decomposes into a geometric component and a width-independent architectural baseline ($R^2 = 0.993$). Linear probing shows coarse concepts survive even 88% feature loss, revealing the floor arises from aggregate loss of fine-grained features in the importance distribution's long tail. Our results connect representation geometry to distillation limits and provide a practical tool for predicting distillation performance from SAE measurements alone.
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