Training Task Experts through Retrieval Based Distillation
Authors: name: Jiaxin Ge, name: Xueying Jia, name: Vijay Viswanathan, name: Hongyin Luo, name: Graham Neubig

One of the most reliable ways to create deployable models for specialized
tasks is to obtain an adequate amount of high-quality task-specific data.
However, for specialized tasks, often such datasets do not exist. Existing
methods address this by creating such data from large language models (LLMs)
and then distilling such knowledge into smaller models. However, these methods
are limited by the quality of the LLMs output, and tend to generate repetitive
or incorrect data. In this work, we present Retrieval Based Distillation
(ReBase), a method that first retrieves data from rich online sources and then
transforms them into domain-specific data. This method greatly enhances data
diversity. Moreover, ReBase generates Chain-of-Thought reasoning and distills
the reasoning capacity of LLMs. We test our method on 4 benchmarks and results
show that our method significantly improves performance by up to 7.8% on SQuAD,
1.37% on MNLI, and 1.94% on BigBench-Hard.