Being Strong Progressively! Enhancing Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models through a Curriculum Learning Framework

Abstract

Knowledge Distillation (KD) compresses large language models (LLMs) by transferring the teacher model's capabilities to a smaller student model, reducing inference cost and memory usage while maintaining performance. However, existing KD methods for LLMs often fail to prevent significant shifts in the student model's distribution during training, leading to issues such as catastrophic forgetting, mode collapse, and training-inference mismatch. To address these challenges, we propose a novel, plug-in curriculum learning framework inspired by the strength training principle of "progressive overload" (POCL), which can be seamlessly integrated into existing white-box KD approaches with minimal computational overhead. The framework comprises two core components: (1) a difficulty measurer that ranks and partitions training samples from easy to hard, and (2) a training scheduler that incrementally introduces these subsets into the distillation process at fixed intervals while applying loss functions with progressively rising temperatures. By starting with the easiest samples and progressively increasing the difficulty, the approach enhances both the stability and efficiency of learning. Extensive experiments in instruction-following settings demonstrate that POCL consistently improves the performance of distilled student models across various white-box KD methods and model families. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of sorted training samples in KD for LLMs. More generally, our work demonstrates how to structure training data within the KD process to enhance the stability and performance of distilled LLMs.