# Contrastive Learning in Distilled Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12472 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12472/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [SentEval: An Evaluation Toolkit for Universal Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05449/) (2018)
- [ConSERT: A Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11741/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Distillation on Intermediate Representations for Language Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14167/) (2020)
- [Probabilistic Contrastive Loss for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01642/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Natural Language Processing models like BERT can provide state-of-the-art word embeddings for downstream NLP tasks. However, these models yet to perform well on Semantic Textual Similarity, and may be too large to be deployed as lightweight edge applications. We seek to apply a suitable contrastive learning method based on the SimCSE paper, to a model architecture adapted from a knowledge distillation based model, DistilBERT, to address these two issues. Our final lightweight model DistilFace achieves an average of 72.1 in Spearman's correlation on STS tasks, a 34.2 percent improvement over BERT base.
