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Baby Llama: knowledge distillation from an ensemble of teachers trained on a small dataset with no performance penalty

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arxiv 2308.02019 v2 pith:LHHRU6OO submitted 2023-08-03 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords performancesmalltraineddatasetdistillationllamamodelbabylm
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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We present our submission to the BabyLM challenge, whose goal was to improve the sample efficiency of language models. We trained an ensemble consisting of a GPT-2 and small LLaMA models on the developmentally-plausible, 10M-word BabyLM dataset, then distilled it into a small, 58M-parameter LLaMA model, which exceeds in performance both of its teachers as well as a similar model trained without distillation. This suggests that distillation can not only retain the full performance of the teacher model when the latter is trained on a sufficiently small dataset; it can exceed it, and lead to significantly better performance than direct training.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Flipping Knowledge Distillation: Leveraging Small Models' Expertise to Enhance LLMs in Text Matching

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A flipped distillation method lets a decoder-only LLM learn text-matching similarity from a smaller encoder teacher through LoRA and a margin-aware contrastive loss, improving matching accuracy and online FAQ retrieval.

  2. GenRecal: Generation after Recalibration from Large to Small Vision-Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A learnable Recalibrator bridges different tokenizers so that small VLMs can distill knowledge from any large VLM, improving their benchmark scores.

  3. SCOUT: Teaching Pre-trained Language Models to Enhance Reasoning via Flow Chain-of-Thought

    cs.AI 2025-05 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    SCOUT combines progressive distillation with a cross-attention module to make recursive latent reasoning work through fine-tuning, yielding up to 1.8% accuracy gains over standard fine-tuning.

  4. Small Language Models: Architectures, Techniques, Evaluation, Problems and Future Adaptation

    cs.CL 2025-05 unverdicted novelty 2.0 of 10

    A survey of small language models that organizes known methods into taxonomies but adds no new models, data, or validated benchmarks.

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