Kangwook Lee

Anshumann, Mohd Abbas Zaidi, Akhil Kedia et al.

Knowledge distillation can be a cost-effective technique to distill knowledge in Large Language Models, if the teacher output logits can be pre-computed and cached. However, successfully applying this to pre-training remains largely unexplored. In this work, we prove that naive approaches for sparse knowledge distillation such as caching Top-K probabilities, while intuitive, provide biased estimates of teacher probability distribution to the student, resulting in suboptimal performance and calibration. We propose an importance-sampling-based method `Random Sampling Knowledge Distillation', which provides unbiased estimates, preserves the gradient in expectation, and requires storing significantly sparser logits. Our method enables faster training of student models with marginal overhead (<10%) compared to cross-entropy based training, while maintaining competitive performance compared to full distillation, across a range of model sizes from 300M to 3B.

Soyeon Choi, Kangwook Lee, Oliver Sng et al.

How does the threat of infectious disease influence sociality among generative agents? We used generative agent-based modeling (GABM), powered by large language models, to experimentally test hypotheses about the behavioral immune system. Across three simulation runs, generative agents who read news about an infectious disease outbreak showed significantly reduced social engagement compared to agents who received no such news, including lower attendance at a social gathering, fewer visits to third places (e.g., cafe, store, park), and fewer conversations throughout the town. In interview responses, agents explicitly attributed their behavioral changes to disease-avoidance motivations. A validity check further indicated that they could distinguish between infectious and noninfectious diseases, selectively reducing social engagement only when there was a risk of infection. Our findings highlight the potential of GABM as an experimental tool for exploring complex human social dynamics at scale.