Co-training and Co-distillation for Quality Improvement and Compression
  of Language Models
Authors: name: Hayeon Lee, name: Rui Hou, name: Jongpil Kim, name: Davis Liang, name: Hongbo Zhang, name: Sung Ju Hwang, name: Alexander Min

Knowledge Distillation (KD) compresses computationally expensive pre-trained
language models (PLMs) by transferring their knowledge to smaller models,
allowing their use in resource-constrained or real-time settings. However, most
smaller models fail to surpass the performance of the original larger model,
resulting in sacrificing performance to improve inference speed. To address
this issue, we propose Co-Training and Co-Distillation (CTCD), a novel
framework that improves performance and inference speed together by co-training
two models while mutually distilling knowledge. The CTCD framework successfully
achieves this based on two significant findings: 1) Distilling knowledge from
the smaller model to the larger model during co-training improves the
performance of the larger model. 2) The enhanced performance of the larger
model further boosts the performance of the smaller model. The CTCD framework
shows promise as it can be combined with existing techniques like architecture
design or data augmentation, replacing one-way KD methods, to achieve further
performance improvement. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the
effectiveness of CTCD, and the small model distilled by CTCD outperforms the
original larger model by a significant margin of 1.66 on the GLUE benchmark.