Knowledge Distillation of LLM for Education

This study proposes a method for distilling the knowledge of fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) into a smaller, more efficient, and accurate neural network, specifically targeting the challenge of deploying these models on resource-constrained devices. Our methodology involves training the smaller student model using the prediction probabilities of the LLM, which serves as a teacher model. This is achieved through a specialized loss function tailored to learn from the LLM's output probabilities, ensuring that the student model closely mimics the teacher's performance. To test this approach, we utilized a large dataset, 7T, containing 6,684 student-written responses to science questions and three other datasets with student-written responses. We also compared performance with original neural network (NN) models to validate the accuracy. Results have shown that the NN and distilled student models have comparable accuracy to the teacher model for the 7T dataset; however, other datasets have shown significantly lower accuracy (28% on average) for NN, though our proposed distilled model is still able to achieve 12\% higher accuracy than NN. Furthermore, the student model size ranges from 0.1M to 0.02M, 100 times smaller in terms of parameters and ten times smaller compared with the original output model size. The significance of this research lies in its potential to make advanced AI technologies accessible in typical educational settings, particularly for automatic scoring.