Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a promising technique for reducing the high computational demand of large language models (LLMs). However, previous KD methods are primarily applied to white-box classification models or training small models to imitate black-box model APIs like ChatGPT. How to effectively distill the knowledge from white-box generative LLMs is still under-explored, which becomes more and more important with the prosperity of LLMs. In this work, we propose MiniLLM that distills smaller language models from generative larger language models. We first replace the forward Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) objective in the standard KD approaches with reverse KLD, which is more suitable for KD on generative language models, to prevent the student model from overestimating the low-probability regions of the teacher distribution. Then, we derive an effective optimization approach to learn this objective. Extensive experiments in the instruction-following setting show that the MiniLLM models generate more precise responses with the higher overall quality, lower exposure bias, better calibration, and higher long-text generation performance. Our method is also scalable for different model families with 120M to 13B parameters. We will release our code and model checkpoints at https://aka.ms/MiniLLM.

本文提出了一种名为MiniLLM的方法，该方法利用Kullback-Leibler散度，会防止学生模型过度估计教师分布的低概率区域，实现了从生成式语言模型中提取出更小的语言模型，该方法在指令遵循情况下进行了广泛的实验，证明了MiniLLM模型的性能表现更佳。

大型语言模型的知识蒸馏