Intermediate layer knowledge distillation (KD) can improve the standard KD technique (which only targets the output of teacher and student models) especially over large pre-trained language models. However, intermediate layer distillation suffers from excessive computational burdens and engineering efforts required for setting up a proper layer mapping. To address these problems, we propose a RAndom Intermediate Layer Knowledge Distillation (RAIL-KD) approach in which, intermediate layers from the teacher model are selected randomly to be distilled into the intermediate layers of the student model. This randomized selection enforce that: all teacher layers are taken into account in the training process, while reducing the computational cost of intermediate layer distillation. Also, we show that it act as a regularizer for improving the generalizability of the student model. We perform extensive experiments on GLUE tasks as well as on out-of-domain test sets. We show that our proposed RAIL-KD approach outperforms other state-of-the-art intermediate layer KD methods considerably in both performance and training-time. * This work has been done while Md Akmal Haidar was at Huawei.† This work has been done while Nithin Anchuri was at Huawei.
Adversarial training of end-to-end (E2E) ASR systems using generative adversarial networks (GAN) has recently been explored for low-resource ASR corpora. GANs help to learn the true data representation through a two-player min-max game. However, training an E2E ASR model using a large ASR corpus with a GAN framework has never been explored, because it might take excessively long time due to high-variance gradient updates and face convergence issues. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for fine-tuning a pretrained ASR model using the GAN objective where the ASR model acts as a generator and a discriminator tries to distinguish the ASR output from the real data. Since the ASR model is pre-trained, we hypothesize that the ASR model output (soft distribution vectors) helps to get higher scores from the discriminator and makes the task of the discriminator harder within our GAN framework, which in turn improves the performance of the ASR model in the fine-tuning stage. Here, the pre-trained ASR model is fine-tuned adversarially against the discriminator using an additional adversarial loss. Experiments on full LibriSpeech dataset show that our proposed approach outperforms baselines and conventional GAN-based adversarial models.
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