TL;DR
On-policy distillation (OPD) has limitations, including high sampling variance and treating the teacher model as a black box. On-Policy Representation Distillation (OPRD) addresses these issues by utilizing hidden states during the distillation process.
✦ Why It Matters
Engineers can improve model training by incorporating hidden states, leading to more stable and efficient learning processes.
Key Takeaways
How It Works
OPRD aligns the hidden states of the student and teacher models during training, allowing the student to learn from the internal representations of the teacher rather than just the final output probabilities. This approach mitigates the sampling variance associated with large vocabularies and provides a more nuanced understanding of the teacher's knowledge.
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