{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/autodisc-automatic-distillation-schedule-for","title":"MiniDisc: Minimal Distillation Schedule for Language Model Compression","arxiv_id":"2205.14570","date":"2022-05-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Chen Zhang","Yang Yang","Qifan Wang","Jiahao Liu","Jingang Wang","Wei Wu","Dawei Song"],"abstract":"Recent studies have uncovered that language model distillation is less effective when facing a large capacity gap between the teacher and the student, and introduced teacher assistant-based distillation to bridge the gap. As a connection, the scale and the performance of the teacher assistant is of vital importance to bring the knowledge from the teacher to the student. However, existing teacher assistant-based methods require maximally many trials before scheduling an optimal teacher assistant. To this end, we propose a minimal distillation schedule (MiniDisc) for scheduling the optimal teacher assistant in minimally one trial. In particular, motivated by the finding that the performance of the student is positively correlated to the scale-performance tradeoff of the teacher assistant, MiniDisc is designed with a $\\lambda$-tradeoff to measure the optimality of the teacher assistant without trial distillation to the student. MiniDisc then can schedule the optimal teacher assistant with the best $\\lambda$-tradeoff in a sandwich framework. MiniDisc is evaluated with an extensive set of experiments on GLUE. Experimental results demonstrate the improved efficiency our MiniDisc compared to several state-of-the-art baselines. We further apply MiniDisc to a language model with billions of parameters and show its scalability.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14570v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.14570v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"autodisc-automatic-distillation-schedule-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/genezc/minidisc","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"knowledge-distillation","task_name":"Knowledge Distillation"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"model-compression","task_name":"Model Compression"},{"task_slug":"scheduling","task_name":"Scheduling"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"knowledge-distillation","method_name":"Knowledge Distillation"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}