跨分词器蒸馏新方法,保留概率质量并提升模型性能
Cross-Tokenizer On-Policy Distillation via Byte-Prefix Marginalization

- 通过字节前缀映射重构教师模型输出分布
- 在六项数学与编程任务上平均提升3.7-6.6分
- 适合需要融合多模型能力的轻量级部署场景
不同家族的开源语言模型具有互补能力,促使通过在线策略蒸馏(OPD)将其整合为紧凑的学生模型。然而,全词汇OPD通常假设共享分词器,而现有跨分词器方法可能丢失教师概率质量或将其分配给语义无关的学生词元。本文提出字节前缀边际化(BPM),将教师的下一个词元分布重新表达于学生词汇表的共享字节空间中。具体地,BPM将每个教师词元的概率分配给其字节表示为前缀的最长学生词元,聚合映射到同一学生词元的质量,并将未匹配质量放入显式残差类别。该方法生成完整词汇、字节对齐且质量保持的目标分布,当相关前缀不跨越多个教师词元时(训练位置满足率超99%),精确恢复教师诱导的字节前缀边际分布;否则使用保质、链式因子化的下界。在Qwen3-32B、GLM-Z1-9B-0414和MiniMax-M2.7作为教师模型时,BPM在六项数学与编程基准上持续优于当前跨分词器方法,六项基准平均@8得分较最强基线提升3.7-6.6分。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Open-weight language models from different families exhibit complementary capabilities, motivating their consolidation into a compact student through on-policy distillation (OPD). However, full-vocabulary OPD typically assumes a shared tokenizer, while existing cross-tokenizer methods may discard teacher probability mass or assign it to student tokens with unrelated content. We introduce Byte-Prefix Marginalization (BPM), which re-expresses the teacher's next-token distribution over the student vocabulary in a shared byte space. Specifically, BPM assigns each teacher token's probability to the longest student token whose byte representation is a prefix of the teacher token's bytes, aggregates mass mapped to the same student token, and places otherwise unmatched mass in an explicit residual category. This produces a vocabulary-complete, byte-aligned, and mass-preserving target for dense OPD. The target exactly recovers the teacher-induced byte-prefix marginal when the relevant prefix does not span multiple teacher tokens (a condition satisfied at more than 99% of training positions) and uses a mass-preserving, chain-factorized lower bound otherwise. Across Qwen3-32B, GLM-Z1-9B-0414, and MiniMax-M2.7 as teachers, BPM consistently outperforms current cross-tokenizer methods on six mathematics and programming benchmarks, improving six-benchmark avg@8 by 3.7-6.6 points over the strongest baselines.
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