2024/11/04 by Vishakha Kalal, Kalal, Vishakha Suresh, Andrew Parry +3
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Machine Learning and Algorithms
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2411.02284
openalex publication_date 2024/11/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Neural approaches to ranking based on pre-trained language models are highly effective in ad-hoc search. However, the computational expense of these models can limit their application. As such, a process known as knowledge distillation is frequently applied to allow a smaller, efficient model to learn from an effective but expensive model. A key example of this is the distillation of expensive API-based commercial Large Language Models into smaller production-ready models. However, due to the opacity of training data and processes of most commercial models, one cannot ensure that a chosen test collection has not been observed previously, creating the potential for inadvertent data contamination. We, therefore, investigate the effect of a contaminated teacher model in a distillation setting. We evaluate several distillation techniques to assess the degree to which contamination occurs during distillation. By simulating a ``worst-case'' setting where the degree of contamination is known, we find that contamination occurs even when the test data represents a small fraction of the teacher's training samples. We, therefore, encourage caution when training using black-box teacher models where data provenance is ambiguous.