Student as an Inherent Denoiser of Noisy Teacher
Jiachen Zhao
Knowledge distillation (KD) has been widely employed to transfer knowledge
from a large language model (LLM) to a specialized model in low-data regimes
through pseudo label learning. However, pseudo labels generated by teacher
models are usually noisy and may influence KD performance. This study delves
into KD with noisy teachers and uncovers that the student model can already
generate more accurate predictions than the teacher labels used to train it
during KD, indicating its inherent ability to denoise noisy teacher labels.
Motivated by this finding, we propose Peer-Advised KD to improve vanilla KD
from noisy teachers. Experiments show that Peer-Advised KD can outperform LLM
by approximately 5% with 50 human-labeled data, and even competitive to
standard supervised finetuning with 750 human-labeled data.