AI Technology & Industry Review
In the new paper Progressive Distillation for Dense Retrieval, a research team from Xiamen U and Microsoft Research presents PROD, a progressive distillation method for dense retrieval that achieves state-of-the-art performance on five widely used benchmarks.
A research team from New York University and Google Research explores whether knowledge distillation really works, showing that a surprisingly large discrepancy often remains between the predictive distributions of the teacher and student models, even when the student has the capacity to perfectly match the teacher.
A Google Research team proposes MergeDistill, a framework for merging pretrained teacher LMs from multiple monolingual/multilingual LMs into a single multilingual task-agnostic student LM to leverage the capabilities of the powerful language-specific LMs while still being multilingual and enabling positive language transfer.
A research team from Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab and Tsinghua University proposes Extract Then Distill (ETD), a generic and flexible strategy for reusing teacher model parameters for efficient and effective task-agnostic distillation that can be applied to student models of any size.