X-Token: Projection-Guided Cross-Tokenizer Knowledge Distillation
Researchers have developed X-Token, a novel knowledge distillation technique designed to improve student models by learning from teacher models with different tokenizers. The method addresses limitations in existing logit-based distillation, such as the uncommon-token failure and over-conservative matching, which can suppress critical tokens or exclude near-equivalent ones. X-Token utilizes a sparse projection matrix to align student and teacher distributions, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods on benchmarks like GSM8k and achieving significant gains with multi-teacher setups. AI
IMPACT Improves cross-tokenizer knowledge transfer, potentially enabling more efficient training of diverse language models.