Honey, I Shrunk the Language Model : Impact of Knowledge Distillation Methods on Performance and Explainability

Titelangaben

Hendriks, Daniel ; Spitzer, Philipp ; Kühl, Niklas ; Satzger, Gerharh:
Honey, I Shrunk the Language Model : Impact of Knowledge Distillation Methods on Performance and Explainability.
In: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. (April 2026) .
ISSN 1558-2191
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2026.3671872

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Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increasingly influenced modern society, recently in particular through significant advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, high computational and storage demands of LLMs still limit their deployment in resource-constrained environments. Knowledge distillation addresses this challenge by training a small student model from a larger teacher model. Previous research has introduced several distillation methods for both generating training data and training the student model. Despite their relevance, the effects of state-of-the-art distillation methods on model performance and explainability have not been thoroughly investigated and compared. In this work, we enlarge the set of available methods by applying critique-revision prompting to distillation for data generation and by synthesizing existing training methods. We systematically compare the distillation methods on the widely used Commonsense Question-Answering (CQA), Extended Stanford Natural Language Inference (ESNLI), and StrategyQA datasets. While we measure performance via student model accuracy, we employ a human-grounded study to evaluate explainability. We contribute new distillation methods and their comparison in terms of both performance and explainability. This should further advance the distillation of small language models and, thus, contribute to broader applicability and faster diffusion of language models.