Clippers 8/29: Ash Lewis on Mitigating Harms of LLMs via Knowledge Distillation for a Virtual Museum Tour Guide

Title: Mitigating Harms of LLMs via Knowledge Distillation for a Virtual Museum Tour Guide

Authors: Ashley Lewis and Michael White

Abstract:

LLMs are known to be very powerful, exhibiting both great benefits and great risk. We seek to leverage the benefits, in particular the ability to be fluent, conversational dialogue agents, while minimizing the risks, such as hallucination and toxic content. In this work we use knowledge distillation to create a virtual museum tour guide dialogue agent, employing ChatGPT as a teacher model for a smaller student model, T5-large. We find the T5 model shows competitive performance, significantly reduces instances of hallucination, and shows promise for reducing toxic content.