{"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/contrastive-distillation-on-intermediate","title":"Contrastive Distillation on Intermediate Representations for Language Model Compression","arxiv_id":"2009.14167","date":"2020-09-29","proceeding":"EMNLP 2020 11","authors":["Siqi Sun","Zhe Gan","Yu Cheng","Yuwei Fang","Shuohang Wang","Jingjing Liu"],"abstract":"Existing language model compression methods mostly use a simple L2 loss to distill knowledge in the intermediate representations of a large BERT model to a smaller one. Although widely used, this objective by design assumes that all the dimensions of hidden representations are independent, failing to capture important structural knowledge in the intermediate layers of the teacher network. To achieve better distillation efficacy, we propose Contrastive Distillation on Intermediate Representations (CoDIR), a principled knowledge distillation framework where the student is trained to distill knowledge through intermediate layers of the teacher via a contrastive objective. By learning to distinguish positive sample from a large set of negative samples, CoDIR facilitates the student's exploitation of rich information in teacher's hidden layers. CoDIR can be readily applied to compress large-scale language models in both pre-training and finetuning stages, and achieves superb performance on the GLUE benchmark, outperforming state-of-the-art compression methods.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.14167v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.14167v1.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":"contrastive-distillation-on-intermediate","repo_url":"https://github.com/intersun/CoDIR","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"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"knowledge-distillation","method_name":"Knowledge Distillation"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2009.14167","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2009.14167"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/intersun/CoDIR","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran":2,"unverified":2},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":4,"ran":2,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"77b22cab2f797943","entry":"ContrastLoss","repo":"intersun/CoDIR","repo_kind":"official","path":"crd/criterion.py","file_url":"https://github.com/intersun/CoDIR/blob/HEAD/crd/criterion.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"77b22cab2f797943"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"aa9ce89e9ecd6653","entry":"Embed","repo":"intersun/CoDIR","repo_kind":"official","path":"crd/criterion.py","file_url":"https://github.com/intersun/CoDIR/blob/HEAD/crd/criterion.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"aa9ce89e9ecd6653"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"bbf45d9a81cb5bba","entry":"CRDLoss","repo":"intersun/CoDIR","repo_kind":"official","path":"crd/criterion.py","file_url":"https://github.com/intersun/CoDIR/blob/HEAD/crd/criterion.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"bbf45d9a81cb5bba"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"6c6451edefae2dc3","entry":"ContrastMemory","repo":"intersun/CoDIR","repo_kind":"official","path":"crd/criterion.py","file_url":"https://github.com/intersun/CoDIR/blob/HEAD/crd/criterion.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"6c6451edefae2dc3"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}