mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

DisCo: Distilled Student Models Co-training for Semi-supervised Text Mining

arXiv 2305.12074 ↗First posted 20 May 2023cs.CLcited by 4

On the map: Knowledge distillation → Knowledge distillation for LLMs

Abstract (arXiv)

Many text mining models are constructed by fine-tuning a large deep pre-trained language model (PLM) in downstream tasks. However, a significant challenge nowadays is maintaining performance when we use a lightweight model with limited labelled samples. We present DisCo, a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework for fine-tuning a cohort of small student models generated from a large PLM using knowledge distillation. Our key insight is to share complementary knowledge among distilled student cohorts to promote their SSL effectiveness. DisCo employs a novel co-training technique to optimize a cohort of multiple small student models by promoting knowledge sharing among students under diversified views: model views produced by different distillation strategies and data views produced by various input augmentations. We evaluate DisCo on both semi-supervised text classification and extractive summarization tasks. Experimental results show that DisCo can produce student models that are 7.6 times smaller and 4.8 times faster in inference than the baseline PLMs while maintaining comparable performance. We also show that DisCo-generated student models outperform the similar-sized models elaborately tuned in distinct tasks.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Knowledge distillation for LLMs, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation. Builds on 49 of its 71 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 May 2023.

Builds on

49 of 71 references.

References · 49

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37 more
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Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 2; 2026: 1.

4 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025LLM on a Budget: Active Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Classification of Large Text Corpora
  2. 2024MiniPLM: Knowledge Distillation for Pre-Training Language Models
  3. 2023Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes
  4. 2023KDSTM: Neural Semi-supervised Topic Modeling with Knowledge Distillation
  5. 2018Mixture of Expert/Imitator Networks: Scalable Semi-supervised Learning Framework
  6. 2021Sparse Distillation: Speeding Up Text Classification by Using Bigger Student Models
  7. 2023Multistage Collaborative Knowledge Distillation from a Large Language Model for Semi-Supervised Sequence Generation
  8. 2024Knowledge Distillation in Automated Annotation: Supervised Text Classification with LLM-Generated Training Labels