提出统一自蒸馏框架,让大模型自我改进更可靠高效
UniSD: Towards a Unified Self-Distillation Framework for Large Language Models

- 整合多教师一致、特征匹配等机制,提升自蒸馏监督可靠性
- 在6个基准上平均提升5.4分,超越最强基线2.8分
- 适合想低成本优化大模型且无需外部教师的研究者
自蒸馏为不依赖更强外部教师的大型语言模型适应提供了有前景的路径。然而,在自回归大模型中,自生成轨迹自由度高,正确性依赖任务,且看似合理的推理仍可能提供不稳定或不可靠的监督。现有方法主要孤立考察设计选择,其有效性、作用及交互关系尚不明确。本文提出UniSD,一个系统研究自蒸馏的统一框架。UniSD整合了互补机制,解决监督可靠性、表征对齐和训练稳定性问题,包括多教师一致性、EMA教师稳定化、词元级对比学习、特征匹配和发散裁剪。在六个基准和三个模型族中的六种模型上,UniSD揭示了自蒸馏何时优于静态模仿,哪些组件带来收益,以及它们在不同任务中的交互方式。基于这些洞察,构建了集成式UniSDfull流水线,结合互补组件,在整体性能上达到最优,相比基线模型提升+5.4点,相比最强基线提升+2.8点。大量评估表明,自蒸馏是一种实用且可调控的大模型高效适配方法,无需更强外部教师。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Self-distillation (SD) offers a promising path for adapting large language models (LLMs) without relying on stronger external teachers. However, SD in autoregressive LLMs remains challenging because self-generated trajectories are free-form, correctness is task-dependent, and plausible rationales can still provide unstable or unreliable supervision. Existing methods mainly examine isolated design choices, leaving their effectiveness, roles, and interactions unclear. In this paper, we propose UniSD, a unified framework to systematically study self-distillation. UniSD integrates complementary mechanisms that address supervision reliability, representation alignment, and training stability, including multi-teacher agreement, EMA teacher stabilization, token-level contrastive learning, feature matching, and divergence clipping. Across six benchmarks and six models from three model families, UniSD reveals when self-distillation improves over static imitation, which components drive the gains, and how these components interact across tasks. Guided by these insights, we construct UniSDfull, an integrated pipeline that combines complementary components and achieves the strongest overall performance, improving over the base model by +5.4 points and the strongest baseline by +2.8 points. Extensive evaluation highlights self-distillation as a practical and steerable approach for efficient LLM adaptation without stronger external teachers.
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