High-dimensional Analysis of Knowledge Distillation: Weak-to-Strong Generalization and Scaling Laws

Muhammed Emrullah Ildiz, Halil Alperen Gozeten, Ege Onur Taga, Marco Mondelli, Samet Oymak

Keywords: empirical risk minimization, high-dimensional statistics, scaling laws, weak to strong generalization, knowledge distillation

TL;DR: This paper provides a sharp characterization of a two-stage learning process, where the first-stage (surrogate) model's output supervises the second stage, thus revealing the form of optimal surrogates and when it is beneficial to discard features.

Abstract: A growing number of machine learning scenarios rely on knowledge distillation where one uses the output of a surrogate model as labels to supervise the training of a target model. In this work, we provide a sharp characterization of this process for ridgeless, high-dimensional regression, under two settings: *(i)* model shift, where the surrogate model is arbitrary, and *(ii)* distribution shift, where the surrogate model is the solution of empirical risk minimization with out-of-distribution data. In both cases, we characterize the precise risk of the target model through non-asymptotic bounds in terms of sample size and data distribution under mild conditions. As a consequence, we identify the form of the optimal surrogate model, which reveals the benefits and limitations of discarding weak features in a data-dependent fashion. In the context of weak-to-strong (W2S) generalization, this has the interpretation that *(i)* W2S training, with the surrogate as the weak model, can provably outperform training with strong labels under the same data budget, but *(ii)* it is unable to improve the data scaling law. We validate our results on numerical experiments both on ridgeless regression and on neural network architectures.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

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Submission Number: 7640