Progressive Distillation

Now that almost everyone has thought about or is actively integrating AI workflows into their projects, some might ask is this all worth the cost? Many think the current economics of the AI space don't scale and that there will be upward price movement. Others still might not be comfortable with sending their data to remote services for processing. Then there is the crowd that wants to deploy models in small spaces with limited compute. Are there ways we can deploy small models locally and run at a lower cost? Yes with Knowledge Distillation . Knowledge distillation can get a bad rap due to it's questionable use in training some Large Language Models (LLMs). But it's a perfectly valid way to transfer performance from a larger model to a smaller one. Especially when both models are yours and/or open. This article will explore progressive distillation which is a technique to incrementally transfer knowledge from a series of larger teacher models into a smaller student. Install dependencies Install txtai and all dependencies. pip install txtai [ pipeline - train ] datasets Setup the Training Pipeline The first step we need to do is setup up the training pipeline. We'll use the Hugging Face Training framework to build a series of models. The following code establishes a train method, test method and loads the classification training data. from datasets import load_dataset from transformers import AutoModelForSequenceClassification , AutoTokenizer from txtai.pipeline import HFTrainer , Labels def train ( teacher , student , distillation , ** kwargs ): trainer = HFTrainer () model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification . from_pretrained ( student , trust_remote_code = True ) tokenizer = AutoTokenizer . from_pretrained ( student , trust_remote_code = True ) return trainer ( ( model , tokenizer ), ds [ " train " ], columns = ( " sentence " , " label " ), maxlength = maxlength , teacher = teacher , distillation = distillation , ** kwargs ) def test ( model ): labels = Labels (