Effective Distillation of Table-based Reasoning Ability from LLMs
Bohao Yang, Chen Tang, Kun Zhao, Chenghao Xiao, Chenghua Lin
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, their enormous parameter size and extremely high requirements for compute power pose challenges for their practical deployment. Recent research has revealed that specific capabilities of LLMs, such as numerical reasoning, can be transferred to smaller models through distillation. Some studies explore the potential of leveraging LLMs to perform table-based reasoning. However, there has been no prior work focusing on table reasoning skills in smaller models specifically tailored for scientific table-to-text generation tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel table-based reasoning distillation approach, with the aim of distilling LLMs into tailored smaller models. Our experimental results have shown that a 220 million parameter model (Flan-T5-base) fine-tuned using distilled data, not only achieves a significant improvement compared to traditionally fine-tuned baselines, but also surpasses specific LLMs on a scientific table-to-text generation dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/Bernard-Yang/DistillTableCoT.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.492
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5538–5550
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.492
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Bohao Yang, Chen Tang, Kun Zhao, Chenghao Xiao, and Chenghua Lin. 2024. Effective Distillation of Table-based Reasoning Ability from LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 5538–5550, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Effective Distillation of Table-based Reasoning Ability from LLMs (Yang et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.492.pdf