# Improving Question Answering Performance Using Knowledge Distillation and Active Learning Source: [Improving Question Answering Performance Using Knowledge Distillation and Active Learning]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T23:34:16.637Z Authors: Yasaman Boreshban, Seyed Morteza Mirbostani, Gholamreza Ghassem-Sani, Seyed Abolghasem Mirroshandel, Shahin Amiriparian Published: 2021-09-26T17:49:54.000Z ## Abstract Contemporary question answering (QA) systems, including transformer-based architectures, suffer from increasing computational and model complexity which render them inefficient for real-world applications with limited resources. Further, training or even fine-tuning such models requires a vast amount of labeled data which is often not available for the task at hand. In this manuscript, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the mentioned challenges and introduce suitable countermeasures. We propose a novel knowledge distillation (KD) approach to reduce the parameter and model complexity of a pre-trained BERT system and utilize multiple active learning (AL) strategies for immense reduction in annotation efforts. In particular, we demonstrate that our model achieves the performance of a 6-layer TinyBERT and DistilBERT, whilst using only 2% of their total parameters. Finally, by the integration of our AL approaches into the BERT framework, we show that state-of-the-art results on the SQuAD dataset can be achieved when we only use 20% of the training data. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()