To Distill or Not to Distill? On the Robustness of Robust Knowledge Distillation
Paper · 2024 · Abdul Waheed, Karima Kadaoui and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Summary
Multilingual speech recognisers such as Whisper and SeamlessM4T are large, costly to run, and mostly tested on Modern Standard Arabic. Their behaviour on dialects is therefore poorly understood. The authors address both problems. They distil Whisper-large-v2 into smaller Arabic-specific students, following the pseudo-labelling recipe of Gandhi et al. (2023). The teacher transcribes unlabelled audio, weak transcripts are discarded with a WER cutoff, and the student is trained on two signals: the surviving labels and the teacher's token distributions (KL term). For evaluation they assemble ten test sets, including several Common Voice versions and a new human-transcribed corpus of five under-represented dialects drawn from TV series. The best student is 25–50% smaller than its teacher. Its overall WER is 45.0%, better than both SeamlessM4T-large-v2 (47.0%) and the teacher (55.1%), and it is the strongest model on the new dialect data (56.9%). An error analysis shows that systems with language-model decoding hallucinate more. The work suggests that compact distilled models can be both cheaper and more robust to linguistic variation.
Key points
- Training objective: a weighted sum of KL divergence (weight 0.8) and cross-entropy on filtered pseudo-labels (weight 1.0), with the weights taken from Gandhi et al. (2023).
- Students: four variants, trained on 100K or 500K segments (roughly 100 or 500 hours). About a quarter of the segments are removed by a deliberately loose WER threshold of 80.
- New dialect corpus: covers ALG, JOR, PAL, UAE and YEM, with 10,567 utterances, 121,293 words and about 13.3 hours. None of it was seen by any model during training.
- Headline results: 45.0% overall WER for the best student, against 47.0% for SeamlessM4T-large-v2 and 55.1% for Whisper-large-v2. JOR and PAL were the easiest dialects across systems.
- Compute cost: training used more than 3000 A100 GPU hours, estimated at over 500 kg of CO2.
Interesting ideas
- I1. Truly unseen evaluation data matters. A distilled model should be judged on data guaranteed to be absent from the teacher's training set, otherwise robustness claims may only reflect memorisation.
- I2. The filter can stay loose on purpose. A permissive quality threshold on teacher outputs imitates a setting with almost no gold labels, so the recipe stays honest for low-resource conditions.
- I3. The student learns from two signals. It copies the teacher's final outputs and also matches its full token distributions, so it learns which alternatives the teacher found plausible.
- I4. A smaller student can beat its teacher. A compact specialised model can outperform the larger generalist that taught it, so distillation can serve as a way to specialise rather than only to compress.
- I5. Error types are worth more than one score. Sorting errors into types, such as hallucinated content from LM-style decoding, explains why a system fails better than a single WER does.
For Mova
How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:
- I1 (learn): Keep a held-out set of texts that no LLM teacher tier or witness parser has seen, and treat it as the decisive test for any silver-trained component.
- I2 (learn): When filtering silver trees by witness agreement, report results at both strict and loose agreement thresholds to show how much the gains depend on gold-like supervision.
- I3 (tree): gparse could be distilled from a larger parser using both the arg-max heads/labels and the teacher's soft head and label distributions, giving a smaller, faster parser with less loss.
- I4 (tree): Distil a general multilingual parser into an English-only, UD-dialect-specific student and compare LAS against the teacher, not just against speed.
- I5 (answer): Tag reader failures by type, such as invented entities versus missed ones, so that fluent but ungrounded answers are caught and traced to the responsible stage.
Institutions
Fields, topics and concepts
📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2,869 worksSignal Processing · 452 works
🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Efficient models & compression · 242 works
Cite
Cite as Abdul Waheed, Karima Kadaoui and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed. 2024. To Distill or Not to Distill? On the Robustness of Robust Knowledge Distillation. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).
@inproceedings{waheed2024distill,
title = {{To Distill or Not to Distill? On the Robustness of Robust Knowledge Distillation}},
author = {Abdul Waheed, Karima Kadaoui and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.680},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.680}
}References
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