The Sequence Knowledge #886: Demystifying Model Distillation

Substack · 2 months ago · 3

Knowledge distillation trains a smaller, cheaper model to learn from a larger model's predictions rather than training directly on raw data. The approach involves having a high-capacity teacher model generate outputs that a smaller student model learns to replicate, combining both the original dataset and the teacher's interpretations. This enables deployment of faster and cheaper models that retain more capability than they would achieve through standard training alone.