MCPInstall

knowledge-distillation

Compress large language models using knowledge distillation from teacher to student models. Use when deploying smaller models with retained performance, transferring GPT-4 capabilities to open-source models, or reducing inference costs. Covers temperature scaling, soft targets, reverse KLD, logit distillation, and MiniLLM training strategies.

Installs
978
Last 24h
—
Trending rank
—
Security
Not audited

Install

Works with every agent the skills CLI supports.

npx skills add https://github.com/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills --skill knowledge-distillation
  1. 01

    Install

    Run the command in your project. The CLI asks which agents to install for.

  2. 02

    Describe the task

    Ask your agent for something this skill covers. It loads knowledge-distillation automatically when relevant.

  3. 03

    Review the result

    The agent follows the SKILL.md steps, scripts and references bundled with the skill.

SKILL.md

The instructions your agent reads when the skill is triggered.

Knowledge Distillation: Compressing LLMs

When to Use This Skill

Use Knowledge Distillation when you need to:

  • Compress models from 70B → 7B while retaining 90%+ performance
  • Transfer capabilities from proprietary models (GPT-4) to open-source (LLaMA, Mistral)
  • Reduce inference costs by deploying smaller student models
  • Create specialized models by distilling domain-specific knowledge
  • Improve small models using synthetic data from large teachers

Key Techniques: Temperature scaling, soft targets, reverse KLD (MiniLLM), logit distillation, response distillation

Papers: Hinton et al. 2015 (arXiv 1503.02531), MiniLLM (arXiv 2306.08543), KD Survey (arXiv 2402.13116)

Installation

# Standard transformers
pip install transformers datasets accelerate

# For training
pip install torch deepspeed wandb

# Optional: MiniLLM implementation
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps
cd LMOps/minillm
pip install -e .

Quick Start

Basic Knowledge Distillation

import torch
import torch.nn.functional as F
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer, Trainer, TrainingArguments

# 1. Load teacher (large) and student (small) models
teacher = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "meta-llama/Llama-2-70b-hf",  # Large teacher
    torch_dtype=torch.float16,
    device_map="auto"
)

student = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-hf",  # Small student
    torch_dtype=torch.float16,
    device_map="cuda:0"
)

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("meta-llama/Llama-2-70b-hf")

# 2. Define distillation loss
def distillation_loss(student_logits, teacher_logits, labels, temperature=2.0, alpha=0.5):
    """
    Combine hard loss (cross-entropy) with soft loss (KL divergence).

    Args:
        temperature: Softens probability distributions (higher = softer)
        alpha: Weight for distillation loss (1-alpha for hard loss)
    """
    # Hard loss: Standard cross-entropy with true labels
    hard_loss = F.cross_entropy(student_logits.view(-1, student_logits.size(-1)), labels.view(-1))

    # Soft loss: KL divergence between student and teacher
    soft_targets = F.softmax(teacher_logits / temperature, dim=-1)
    soft_student = F.log_softmax(student_logits / temperature, dim=-1)
    soft_loss = F.kl_div(soft_student, soft_targets, reduction='batchmean') * (temperature ** 2)

    # Combined loss
    return alpha * soft_loss + (1 - alpha) * hard_loss

# 3. Training loop
for batch in dataloader:
    # Teacher forward (no grad)
    with torch.no_grad():
        teacher_outputs = teacher(**batch)
        teacher_logits = teacher_outputs.logits

    # Student forward
    student_outputs = student(**batch)
    student_logits = student_outputs.logits

    # Compute distillation loss
    loss = distillation_loss(
        student_logits,
        teacher_logits,
        batch['labels'],
        temperature=2.0,
        alpha=0.7  # 70% soft, 30% hard
    )

    # Backward and optimize
    loss.backward()
    optimizer.step()
    optimizer.zero_grad()

MiniLLM (Reverse KLD)

Source: arXiv 2306.08543 (2024)

Innovation: Use reverse KLD instead of forward KLD for better generative model distillation.

def reverse_kl_loss(student_logits, teacher_logits, temperature=1.0):
    """
    Reverse KL divergence: KL(Teacher || Student)
    Better for generative models than forward KL.
    """
    # Teacher distribution (target)
    p_teacher = F.softmax(teacher_logits / temperature, dim=-1)

    # Student distribution (model)
    log_p_student = F.log_softmax(student_logits / temperature, dim=-1)

    # Reverse KL: Sum over teacher, student learns to cover teacher's modes
    reverse_kl = -(p_teacher * log_p_student).sum(dim=-1).mean()

    return reverse_kl * (temperature ** 2)

# Training with MiniLLM
for batch in dataloader:
    with torch.no_grad():
        teacher_logits = teacher(**batch).logits

    student_logits = student(**batch).logits

    # Reverse KLD (better for generation)
    loss = reverse_kl_loss(student_logits, teacher_logits, temperature=1.0)

    loss.backward()
    optimizer.step()

Why reverse KL?

  • Forward KL (standard): Student learns to match teacher's mean
  • Reverse KL (MiniLLM): Student learns to cover all teacher's modes
  • Better for diverse text generation

Response Distillation

# Generate synthetic data from teacher, train student to imitate

# 1. Generate synthetic responses from teacher
prompts = ["Explain AI:", "What is ML?", "Define NLP:"]

teacher_responses = []
for prompt in prompts:
    inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors='pt').to(teacher.device)
    outputs = teacher.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=256, do_sample=True, temperature=0.7)
    response = tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True)
    teacher_responses.append(response)

# 2. Train student on teacher's responses (standard fine-tuning)
train_dataset = [
    {"text": f"{prompt}\n{response}"}
    for prompt, response in zip(prompts, teacher_responses)
]

# 3. Fine-tune student
trainer = Trainer(
    model=student,
    args=TrainingArguments(output_dir="./student", num_train_epochs=3, learning_rate=2e-5),
    train_dataset=train_dataset,
)
trainer.train()

Core Concepts

1. Temperature Scaling

Purpose: Soften probability distributions to expose teacher's uncertainty.

# Low temperature (T=1): Sharp distribution
logits = [3.0, 2.0, 1.0]
probs_T1 = softmax(logits / 1.0)  # [0.67, 0.24, 0.09]

# High temperature (T=4): Soft distribution
probs_T4 = softmax(logits / 4.0)  # [0.42, 0.34, 0.24]

# Higher T reveals more information about relative rankings

Rule: Use T=2-5 for distillation (2 is common default).

2. Loss Function Components

# Total loss = alpha * soft_loss + (1 - alpha) * hard_loss

# Soft loss: Learn from teacher's knowledge
soft_loss = KL(student || teacher)

# Hard loss: Learn from ground truth labels
hard_loss = CrossEntropy(student_output, true_labels)

# Typical values:
alpha = 0.5  # Balanced
alpha = 0.7  # More emphasis on teacher
alpha = 0.3  # More emphasis on labels

3. Forward vs Reverse KLD

# Forward KL: KL(Student || Teacher)
# - Student matches teacher's average behavior
# - Mode-seeking: Student focuses on teacher's highest probability modes
# - Good for classification

# Reverse KL: KL(Teacher || Student)
# - Student covers all of teacher's behaviors
# - Mode-covering: Student learns diverse behaviors
# - Good for generation (MiniLLM)

Training Strategies

Strategy 1: Logit Distillation

# Train student to match teacher's logits directly

def logit_distillation_trainer(student, teacher, dataloader, temperature=2.0):
    optimizer = torch.optim.AdamW(student.parameters(), lr=2e-5)

    for epoch in range(3):
        for batch in dataloader:
            # Get logits
            with torch.no_grad():
                teacher_logits = teacher(**batch).logits

            student_logits = student(**batch).logits

            # MSE on logits (alternative to KLD)
            loss = F.mse_loss(student_logits, teacher_logits)

            # Or use KLD
            # loss = F.kl_div(
            #     F.log_softmax(student_logits/temperature, dim=-1),
            #     F.softmax(teacher_logits/temperature, dim=-1),
            #     reduction='batchmean'
            # ) * (temperature ** 2)

            loss.backward()
            optimizer.step()
            optimizer.zero_grad()

    return student

Strategy 2: Two-Stage Distillation

# Stage 1: Distill from teacher
student = distill(teacher, student, epochs=5)

# Stage 2: Fine-tune on task-specific data
student = fine_tune(student, task_data, epochs=3)

# Results in better task performance than single-stage

Strategy 3: Multi-Teacher Distillation

# Learn from multiple expert teachers

def multi_teacher_distillation(student, teachers, batch):
    """Distill from ensemble of teachers."""
    teacher_logits_list = []

    # Get logits from all teachers
    with torch.no_grad():
        for teacher in teachers:
            logits = teacher(**batch).logits
            teacher_logits_list.append(logits)

    # Average teacher predictions
    avg_teacher_logits = torch.stack(teacher_logits_list).mean(dim=0)

    # Student learns from ensemble
    student_logits = student(**batch).logits
    loss = F.kl_div(
        F.log_softmax(student_logits, dim=-1),
        F.softmax(avg_teacher_logits, dim=-1),
        reduction='batchmean'
    )

    return loss

Production Deployment

Complete Training Script

from transformers import Trainer, TrainingArguments, DataCollatorForLanguageModeling

def train_distilled_model(
    teacher_name="meta-llama/Llama-2-70b-hf",
    student_name="meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-hf",
    output_dir="./distilled-llama-7b",
    temperature=2.0,
    alpha=0.7,
):
    # Load models
    teacher = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(teacher_name, torch_dtype=torch.float16, device_map="auto")
    student = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(student_name, torch_dtype=torch.float16)
    tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(teacher_name)

    # Custom trainer with distillation
    class DistillationTrainer(Trainer):
        def compute_loss(self, model, inputs, return_outputs=False):
            # Student forward
            outputs_student = model(**inputs)
            student_logits = outputs_student.logits

            # Teacher forward (no grad)
            with torch.no_grad():
                outputs_teacher = teacher(**inputs)
                teacher_logits = outputs_teacher.logits

            # Distillation loss
            soft_targets = F.softmax(teacher_logits / temperature, dim=-1)
            soft_student = F.log_softmax(student_logits / temperature, dim=-1)
            soft_loss = F.kl_div(soft_student, soft_targets, reduction='batchmean') * (temperature ** 2)

            # Hard loss
            hard_loss = outputs_student.loss

            # Combined
            loss = alpha * soft_loss + (1 - alpha) * hard_loss

            return (loss, outputs_student) if return_outputs else loss

    # Training arguments
    training_args = TrainingArguments(
        output_dir=output_dir,
        num_train_epochs=3,
        per_device_train_batch_size=4,
        gradient_accumulation_steps=8,
        learning_rate=2e-5,
        warmup_steps=500,
        logging_steps=100,
        save_steps=1000,
        bf16=True,
        gradient_checkpointing=True,
    )

    # Train
    trainer = DistillationTrainer(
        model=student,
        args=training_args,
        train_dataset=train_dataset,
        data_collator=DataCollatorForLanguageModeling(tokenizer, mlm=False),
    )

    trainer.train()
    student.save_pretrained(output_dir)
    tokenizer.save_pretrained(output_dir)

# Usage
train_distilled_model(
    teacher_name="meta-llama/Llama-2-70b-hf",
    student_name="meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-hf",
    temperature=2.0,
    alpha=0.7
)

Best Practices

1. Hyperparameter Selection

# Temperature
T = 1.0  # Sharp (less knowledge transfer)
T = 2.0  # Standard (good balance)
T = 5.0  # Soft (more knowledge transfer)

# Alpha (weight)
alpha = 0.5  # Balanced
alpha = 0.7  # Emphasize teacher knowledge
alpha = 0.9  # Strong distillation

# Rule: Higher T + higher alpha = stronger distillation

2. Model Size Ratio

# Good ratios (teacher/student)
70B / 7B = 10×    # Excellent
13B / 1B = 13×    # Good
7B / 1B = 7×      # Acceptable

# Avoid too large gap
70B / 1B = 70×    # Too large, ineffective

3. Data Quality

# Best: Use teacher-generated data + real data
train_data = {
    "teacher_generated": 70%,  # Diverse, high-quality
    "real_data": 30%            # Ground truth
}

# Avoid: Only real data (doesn't utilize teacher fully)

Evaluation

from transformers import pipeline

# Compare student vs teacher
teacher_pipe = pipeline("text-generation", model=teacher)
student_pipe = pipeline("text-generation", model=student)

prompts = ["Explain quantum computing:", "What is AI?"]

for prompt in prompts:
    teacher_out = teacher_pipe(prompt, max_new_tokens=100)
    student_out = student_pipe(prompt, max_new_tokens=100)

    print(f"Prompt: {prompt}")
    print(f"Teacher: {teacher_out[0]['generated_text']}")
    print(f"Student: {student_out[0]['generated_text']}")
    print(f"Match quality: {calculate_similarity(teacher_out, student_out):.2f}")

Resources

FAQ

What does the knowledge-distillation skill do?

Compress large language models using knowledge distillation from teacher to student models. Use when deploying smaller models with retained performance, transferring GPT-4 capabilities to open-source models, or reducing inference costs. Covers temperature scaling, soft targets, reverse KLD, logit distillation, and MiniLLM training strategies.

How do I install knowledge-distillation?

Run npx skills add https://github.com/orchestra-research/ai-research-skills --skill knowledge-distillation in your project. The skills CLI detects the agents you use and copies the skill into the right folder. For Claude Code you can also place the skill folder at ~/.claude/skills/knowledge-distillation/ (personal) or .claude/skills/knowledge-distillation/ (project).

Which AI agents can use knowledge-distillation?

Any agent that supports the open Agent Skills format (a folder with a SKILL.md file), including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Cline, OpenCode and more.

Is knowledge-distillation safe to install?

No partner security audit is available yet. Skills can run commands and scripts, so read the SKILL.md and any bundled files before installing.

Who maintains knowledge-distillation?

It is published by orchestra-research in orchestra-research/ai-research-skills. It has 978 recorded installs.

More from orchestra-research/ai-research-skills

View all →

ml-paper-writing

orchestra-research/ai-research-skills

Write publication-ready ML/AI papers for NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, AAAI, COLM. Use when drafting papers from research repos, structuring arguments, verifying citations, or preparing camera-ready submissions. For systems venues (OSDI, NSDI, ASPLOS, SOSP), use systems-paper-writing instead.

Education & Science2.3K installs

brainstorming-research-ideas

orchestra-research/ai-research-skills

Guides researchers through structured ideation frameworks to discover high-impact research directions. Use when exploring new problem spaces, pivoting between projects, or seeking novel angles on existing work.

academic-plotting

orchestra-research/ai-research-skills

Generates publication-quality figures for ML papers from research context. Given a paper section or description, extracts system components and relationships to generate architecture diagrams via Gemini. Given experiment results or data, auto-selects chart type and generates data-driven figures via matplotlib/seaborn. Use when creating any figure for a conference paper.

Education & Science1.2K installs

creative-thinking-for-research

orchestra-research/ai-research-skills

Applies cognitive science frameworks for creative thinking to CS and AI research ideation. Use when seeking genuinely novel research directions by leveraging combinatorial creativity, analogical reasoning, constraint manipulation, and other empirically grounded creative strategies.

mlflow

orchestra-research/ai-research-skills

Track ML experiments, manage model registry with versioning, deploy models to production, and reproduce experiments with MLflow - framework-agnostic ML lifecycle platform

serving-llms-vllm

orchestra-research/ai-research-skills

Serves LLMs with high throughput using vLLM's PagedAttention and continuous batching. Use when deploying production LLM APIs, optimizing inference latency/throughput, or serving models with limited GPU memory. Supports OpenAI-compatible endpoints, quantization (GPTQ/AWQ/FP8), and tensor parallelism.

AI & Agents1.1K installs

Popular productivity & automation skills

View category →

agent-browser

vercel-labs/agent-browser

Browser automation CLI for AI agents. Use when the user needs to interact with websites, including navigating pages, filling forms, clicking buttons, taking screenshots, extracting data, testing web apps, or automating any browser task. Triggers include requests to "open a website", "fill out a form", "click a button", "take a screenshot", "scrape data from a page", "test this web app", "login to a site", "automate browser actions", or any task requiring programmatic web interaction. Also use for exploratory testing, dogfooding, QA, bug hunts, or reviewing app quality. Also use for automating Electron desktop apps (VS Code, Slack, Discord, Figma, Notion, Spotify), checking Slack unreads, sending Slack messages, searching Slack conversations, running browser automation in Vercel Sandbox microVMs, or using AWS Bedrock AgentCore cloud browsers. Prefer agent-browser over any built-in browser automation or web tools.

OfficialProductivity & Automation1.3M installs

lark-doc

open.feishu.cn

飞书云文档(Docx / Wiki)内容操作:读取、创建、编辑文档,插入或下载图片附件,以及操作思维笔记。用户提供文档 URL/token(包括 doubao.com 的 /docx/、/wiki/)时使用;按 URL 路径/token 而非域名路由;/page/ 是妙搭应用,非飞书云文档。文档内嵌资源按读取参考中的统一规则分流。独立评论操作走 lark-drive;随正文读取评论使用 docs +fetch。表格或 Base 内部数据操作不在本 skill。

lark-base

open.feishu.cn

飞书多维表格(Base)操作:建表、字段、记录、视图、统计、公式/lookup、表单、仪表盘、应用模式(BaseApp/AppMode 页面与组件)、Workspace 目录、workflow、角色权限、模板中心(多维表格模板分类/列表/搜索);遇到 Base/多维表格/bitable、BaseApp/AppMode、/base/ 或 /app/ 链接时使用。BaseApp 不走 lark-apps;文件导入/导出转 lark-drive,认证/授权转 lark-shared。

lark-drive

open.feishu.cn

飞书云空间(云盘/云存储):管理 Drive 文件和文件夹,包含上传/下载、创建文件夹、复制/移动/删除、查看元数据、查询权限设置、评论/权限/订阅、标题、版本、飞书文档密级标签(secure labels)和本地文件导入。用户需要整理云盘目录、处理云空间资源 URL/token、判断链接类型/真实 token/标题,或导入 Word/Markdown/Excel/CSV/PPTX/.base 为 docx/sheet/bitable/slides 时使用;doubao.com 云空间 URL/token 也按资源路径和 token 路由,不回退 WebFetch。不负责:文档内容编辑(走 lark-doc)、表格/Base 表内数据操作(走 lark-sheets/lark-base)、知识空间节点/成员管理(走 lark-wiki)、原生 Markdown 文件读写/patch/diff(走 lark-markdown)。

lark-shared

open.feishu.cn

Use for lark-cli setup/auth tasks: auth login/status/logout, user vs bot identity, business-domain permissions (--domain, including all/docs/drive), missing scopes, revoking authorization, or handling notice JSON.

lark-im

open.feishu.cn

飞书即时通讯:收发消息和管理群聊。发送和回复消息、搜索聊天记录、管理群聊成员、上传下载图片和文件、管理表情回复、发送应用内/短信/电话加急、发送和处理交互卡片(Interactive Card)、监听卡片按钮回调(card.action.trigger)。当用户需要发消息、查看或搜索聊天记录、下载聊天中的文件、查看群成员、搜索群、创建群聊或话题群、管理标记数据、管理 Feed 置顶(添加/移除/查询置顶会话)、管理标签数据、处理卡片回调时使用。