alt Hacker NewsCan someone explain what are teachers in Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation? I can imagine math, coding and other verifiable domains, but they also have biology? Is it where distillation from bigger models come in?
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porridgeraisin • today at 5:08 PM
They're other models yes.
They reference https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/on-policy-distillation/
If I understand correctly, it's distillation via having a teacher model score each of the student's tokens for a problem based on their own probabilities of generating that token at each step in the sequence. The reward/loss is then applied as RL.
The multi-teacher bit seems to imply they're distilling from multiple models. It's light on the details, but it seems like it could be part of distilling from frontier/closed models. Provided they calculate the logprobs, which OpenAI seems to allow via API but not Anthropic. Maybe they have a way of estimating the logprobs externally?
This method can be used to learn any domain from the teacher. Biology included.