BitNet Distillation

🤗 Upvotes: 26 | cs.LG, cs.CL

Authors:
Xun Wu, Shaohan Huang, Wenhui Wang, Ting Song, Li Dong, Yan Xia, Furu Wei

Title:
BitNet Distillation

Arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13998v1

Abstract:
In this paper, we present BitNet Distillation (BitDistill), a lightweight pipeline that fine-tunes off-the-shelf full-precision LLMs (e.g., Qwen) into 1.58-bit precision (i.e., ternary weights {-1, 0, 1}) for specific downstream tasks, achieving strong task-specific performance with minimal computational cost. Specifically, BitDistill incorporates three key techniques: the SubLN module, as introduced in BitNet; multi-head attention distillation, based on MiniLM; and continual pre-training, which serves as a crucial warm-up step to mitigate the scalability issue of the performance gap between finetuned full-precision and 1.58-bit LLMs on specific tasks. Experimental results show that BitDistill achieves performance comparable to the full-precision counterpart models across model size, while enabling up to 10x memory savings and 2.65x faster inference on CPUs. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/BitNet.