uDistil-Whisper: Label-Free Data Filtering for Knowledge Distillation via Large-Scale Pseudo Labelling

Recent work on distilling Whisper's knowledge into small models using pseudo-labels shows promising performance while reducing the size by up to 50\%. This results in small, efficient, and dedicated models. However, a critical step of distillation from pseudo-labels involves filtering high-quality predictions and using only those during training. This step requires ground truth to compare and filter bad examples making the whole process supervised. In addition to that, the distillation process requires a large amount of data thereby limiting the ability to distil models in low-resource settings. To address this challenge, we propose an unsupervised or label-free framework for distillation, thus eliminating the requirement for labeled data altogether. Through experimentation, we show that our best distilled models outperform the teacher model by 5-7 points in terms of WER. Additionally, our models are on par with or better than similar supervised data filtering setup. When we scale the data, our models significantly outperform all zero-shot and supervised models. In this work, we demonstrate that it's possible to distill large Whisper models into relatively small models without using any labeled data. As a result, our distilled models are 25-50\% more compute and memory efficient while maintaining performance equal to or better than the teacher model.