# Improving Knowledge Distillation for BERT Models: Loss Functions, Mapping Methods, and Weight Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13958 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13958/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge distillation for LLMs, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 8 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2023.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Knowledge distillation for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/distill/knowledge-distillation-for-llms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [Neural Network Acceptability Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12471/) (2018)
- [Patient Knowledge Distillation for BERT Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09355/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [InFiConD: Interactive No-code Fine-tuning with Concept-based Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17838/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The use of large transformer-based models such as BERT, GPT, and T5 has led to significant advancements in natural language processing. However, these models are computationally expensive, necessitating model compression techniques that reduce their size and complexity while maintaining accuracy. This project investigates and applies knowledge distillation for BERT model compression, specifically focusing on the TinyBERT student model. We explore various techniques to improve knowledge distillation, including experimentation with loss functions, transformer layer mapping methods, and tuning the weights of attention and representation loss and evaluate our proposed techniques on a selection of downstream tasks from the GLUE benchmark. The goal of this work is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge distillation, enabling the development of more efficient and accurate models for a range of natural language processing tasks.