Mechanism

Replaces forward KL divergence DKL(πteacher∥πθ)\mathbb{D}_{\text{KL}}(\pi_{\text{teacher}}\|\pi_\theta) (which forces a small-capacity student to spread probability mass across all modes of the teacher, producing hallucinations in low-density voids) with Reverse KL DKL(πθ∥πteacher)\mathbb{D}_{\text{KL}}(\pi_\theta\|\pi_{\text{teacher}}) optimized via policy gradient with single-step decomposition and teacher-mixed rollout stabilization.

References

  1. MiniLLM: On-Policy Distillation of Large Language Models ↗

    Yuxian Gu, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Minlie Huang · 2023