| name | distilqwen |
| description | DistilQwen2.5 — Alibaba's industrial practices for training distilled open lightweight language models. Knowledge distillation from Qwen2.5 72B into smaller 0.5B-7B models. |
| tags | ["distilqwen","knowledge-distillation","qwen","lightweight-llm","alibaba","zorai"] |
Overview
DistilQwen2.5 (Alibaba, arXiv:2504.15027) provides industrial practices for training distilled open lightweight LLMs. The approach distills Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct into smaller models (0.5B, 1.5B, 3B, 7B) with strong performance retention.
Key Techniques
- Logit-level distillation: transfer output distribution from teacher to student
- Representation alignment: align hidden states between teacher and student layers
- Data curriculum: progressive difficulty in training data selection
- Multi-stage training: pre-training distillation → instruction tuning → preference alignment
Usage
The distilled models are available on HuggingFace as distilqwen/distilqwen2.5-*-instruct and can be used directly:
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("distilqwen/distilqwen2.5-1.5b-instruct")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("distilqwen/distilqwen2.5-1.5b-instruct")
References