Chunk-Distilled Language Modeling
Yanhong Li Karen Livescu Jiawei Zhou
We introduce Chunk-Distilled Language Modeling (CD-LM), an approach to text generation that addresses two challenges in current large language models (LLMs): the inefficiency of token-level generation, and the difficulty of adapting to new data and knowledge. Our method combines deep network-based LLMs with a straightforward retrieval module, which allows the generation of multi-token text chunks at a single decoding step. Our retrieval framework enables flexible construction of model- or domain-specific datastores, either leveraging the internal knowledge of existing models, or incorporating expert insights from human-annotated corpora. This adaptability allows for enhanced control over the language model's distribution without necessitating additional training. We present the CD-LM formulation along with performance metrics demonstrating its ability to improve language model performance and efficiency across a diverse set of downstream applications. Code and data will be made publicly available.
language modeling, text generation, retrieval-augmented generation, domain adaptation, inference algorithms, efficient generation
A training-free language modeling approach that dynamically inject text chunks into generation through fine-grained retrieval, with the ability to adapt model distribution and increase inference efficiency.