Teacher Supervision与温度校准的风险精确分析:蒸馏学生无法靠数据摆脱教师偏差
Teacher Supervision, Fixed Representations and Calibration: Exact Risk Calculations for Candidate-Scoring Decision Models
蒸馏来的概率继承老师的偏差,加再多数据也去不掉,这篇用精确计算证明了这点,还拿 CFPB 23 万条投诉数据做了实测。
这篇 arXiv 论文在高斯代理模型上对候选打分决策模型(以 Jev 和 JevAny 为例)的三种训练要素做精确风险计算:教师软标签、冻结预训练表征和温度校准。理论显示学生蒸馏教师的偏差不会因学生数据增多而消除,师生一致也无法揭示该偏差;冻结表征只在样本量低于显式阈值时降低风险。在 CFPB 的 231,521 条信用卡投诉数据上,用教师概率训练的学生止步于教师的决策成本,而直接用真实结果训练的学生成本低 8%;一个 30B 模型零样本重校准后仍差于教师,且偏离 Luce 公理一致性条件 17.5 decibans。结论是预训练表征省标注数据、校准修正概率尺度,但都不修正有偏的教师,概率必须与实际结果核对。
Teacher Supervision, Fixed Representations and Calibration: Exact Risk Calculations for Candidate-Scoring Decision Models
Candidate-scoring decision models return a probability distribution over a presented set of answers. Public documentation of one such system, Jev, and of an open counterpart, JevAny, describes three training ingredients that determine what these probabilities estimate: soft targets from larger models, a frozen pretrained backbone and temperature calibration. We analyze each ingredient in Gaussian surrogates where the finite-sample risk can be computed exactly. A student trained on teacher targets inherits the teacher's bias, which more student data does not remove and agreement with the teacher does not reveal. A fixed representation lowers the risk only below an explicit sample-size threshold. In a probit model the exact recalibration map is a temperature scaling, which removes all excess risk only when the teacher's coefficient has the correct direction and otherwise leaves a residual that calibration diagnostics do not detect. Under Luce's choice axiom, candidate scores are coherent across refinements of an event if and only if they aggregate by log-sum-exp. On 231,521 credit card complaints from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where the decision is whether a complaint ends in monetary relief, a student trained on a logistic teacher's probabilities ends at the teacher's decision cost while a student trained on outcomes goes 8% below it, a 30B model read zero-shot remains worse than the teacher after recalibration, and that model departs from the coherence condition by 17.5 decibans. Pretrained representations reduce the labeled data required and calibration corrects the scale of the probabilities, but neither corrects a biased teacher, so the probabilities have to be checked against realized outcomes.