Why Skip If You Can Combine: A Simple Knowledge Distillation Technique for Intermediate Layers

Yimeng Wu, Peyman Passban, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Qun Liu


Abstract
With the growth of computing power neural machine translation (NMT) models also grow accordingly and become better. However, they also become harder to deploy on edge devices due to memory constraints. To cope with this problem, a common practice is to distill knowledge from a large and accurately-trained teacher network (T) into a compact student network (S). Although knowledge distillation (KD) is useful in most cases, our study shows that existing KD techniques might not be suitable enough for deep NMT engines, so we propose a novel alternative. In our model, besides matching T and S predictions we have a combinatorial mechanism to inject layer-level supervision from T to S. In this paper, we target low-resource settings and evaluate our translation engines for Portuguese→English, Turkish→English, and English→German directions. Students trained using our technique have 50% fewer parameters and can still deliver comparable results to those of 12-layer teachers.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.74
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1016–1021
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.74
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.74
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yimeng Wu, Peyman Passban, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, and Qun Liu. 2020. Why Skip If You Can Combine: A Simple Knowledge Distillation Technique for Intermediate Layers. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 1016–1021, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Why Skip If You Can Combine: A Simple Knowledge Distillation Technique for Intermediate Layers (Wu et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.74.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938915
Code
 yimeng0701/CKD_pytorch +  additional community code