Knowledge distillation (KD) is widely used for compressing a teacher model to a smaller student model, reducing its inference cost and memory footprint while preserving model capabilities. However, current KD methods for auto-regressive sequence models (e.g., large language models) suffer from missing a standardized objective function. Moreover, the recent use of student-generated outputs to address training-inference mismatches has significantly escalated computational costs. To tackle these issues, we introduce DistiLLM, a more effective and efficient KD framework for auto-regressive language models. DistiLLM comprises two components: (1) a novel skew Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, where we unveil and leverage its theoretical properties, and (2) an adaptive off-policy approach designed to enhance the efficiency in utilizing student-generated outputs. Extensive experiments, including instruction-following tasks, demonstrate the effectiveness of DistiLLM in building high-performing student models while achieving up to 4.3$\times$ speedup compared to recent KD methods.

DistiLLM是一种更有效和高效的知识蒸馏框架，适用于自回归语言模型，通过引入倾斜的Kullback-Leibler散度损失和自适应的离策略方法，构建高性能的学生模型，并相较于最近的知识蒸馏方法获得最高4.3倍的加速比。

DistiLLM：面向大型语言模型的精简蒸馏