Distillation Scaling Laws

2025/02/12 by Dan Busbridge, Busbridge, Dan, Amitis Shidani +9 · 9 voices · 30 citations
Chemistry · Engineering · Mathematics · #Chemistry #Chromatography #Distillation #Environmental science #Geometry #Law #Mathematics #Political science #Process Optimization and Integration #Scaling #Scaling law

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.08606

published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)

openalex publication_date 2025/02/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We propose a distillation scaling law that estimates distilled model performance based on a compute budget and its allocation between the student and teacher. Our findings mitigate the risks associated with large-scale distillation by enabling compute-optimal allocation for both the teacher and student to maximize student performance. We provide compute-optimal distillation recipes for two key scenarios: when a teacher already exists, and when a teacher needs training. In settings involving many students or an existing teacher, distillation outperforms supervised learning up to a compute level that scales predictably with student size. Conversely, if only one student is to be distilled and a teacher also requires training, supervised learning is generally preferable. Additionally, our large-scale study of distillation increases our understanding of the process and helps inform experimental design.

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Discussions

• Apple researchers studied when to distill a smaller AI model from a larger one vs. when to fine-tune directly. Findings : • Distillation is best when compute is limited or training multiple models • [bsky, 13 points, 0 comments]
• Distillation Scaling Laws [hn, 5 points, 0 comments]
• Reading "Distilling Knowledge in a Neural Network" left me fascinated and wondering: "If I want a small, capable model, should I distill from a more powerful model, or train from scratch?" Our disti [bsky, 3 points, 1 comments]
• Distillation Scaling Laws [hn, 3 points, 0 comments]
• "Distillation Scaling Laws" arxiv.org/abs/2502.08606 [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]
• Distillation Scaling Laws https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08606 #AI [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
• paper here: arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08606 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
• arxiv.org/abs/2502.08606 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
• Distillation scaling laws Distillation works, but you must balance the difference between loss (performance) of the teacher & student, they need to be similar paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.08606 o3-min [bsky, 0 points, 1 comments]

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