arXiv Machine Learning

Distill Globally, Adapt Locally: Reasoning Distillation and Product-Type Test-Time Training for Scalable Trade-Up Recommendation

The paper presents a two-level framework for scalable trade‑up recommendation. Level 1 distills large‑language‑model reasoning into a compact, non‑generative student that classifies product pairs using only precomputed embeddings, achieving high AUC on a benchmark. Level 2 applies product‑type test‑time training to fine‑tune lightweight adapters, further improving performance while keeping inference fast and inexpensive.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

rEDMRec: Distilling Large Language Model Reasoning into an Editable Experience Memory for Recommendation

The paper introduces rEDMRec, a method that compresses a large language model’s reasoning about user preferences and item comparisons into a compact, editable memory. This memory, organized into four channels—long‑term preference, short‑term context, item perception, and counterfactual hard‑negative comparisons—can be updated by an LLM controller and queried by a lightweight student LLM for ranking, eliminating the need to re‑run the expensive teacher model for each request. Experiments on ML‑1M, Amazon Beauty, and Steam datasets show that rEDMRec consistently outperforms zero‑shot, few‑shot, RAG, and GraphRAG baselines, achieving up to a 13.3% improvement in HR@1 on ML‑1M.

By Minh Hoang Nguyen, Tung Le, Huy Tien Nguyen
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Beyond Scaling Law: A Data-Efficient Distillation Framework for Reasoning

arXiv:2508. 09883v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities in tasks such as algorithmic coding and mathematical problem-solving.

By Xiaojun Wu, Xiaoguang Jiang, Huiyang Li, Jucai Zhai, Dengfeng Liu, Qiaobo Hao, Huang Liu, Zhiguo Yang, Ji Xie, Ninglun Gu, Jin Yang, Kailai Zhang, Yelun Bao, Jun Wang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 13

The Embedder's Dilemma: LLMs Are Better, but at What Cost?

Should you replace your text-embedding pipeline with a large language model? We answer this with a controlled, cost-aware comparison of ten LLMs across six families and 26 embedding models (118M to 14B parameters) on 37 tasks spanning classification, semantic textual similarity (STS), clustering, pair classification, and retrieval.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

ALRA: Adaptive Local Relational Alignment for Logit-Based Pre-training Distillation of Autoregressive Language Models

The paper introduces Adaptive Local Relational Alignment (ALRA), a logit‑based knowledge distillation method for autoregressive language models that combines student‑generated token proposals with teacher guidance at each prediction position. ALRA dynamically selects the number of candidate tokens based on the teacher’s probability spread, uses Adaptive Local Divergence to match both mass and relative token distributions, and applies Student‑Weighted Pairwise Relational Alignment to focus on high‑probability token pairs. Experiments on The Pile show that 200M‑ and 500M‑parameter students trained with ALRA outperform the best baseline by roughly 1 percentage point and surpass pre‑training without distillation by over 2 percentage points on nine zero‑shot benchmarks.

By Quang Hoang Trung, Quang Huu Hieu, Nguyen Van Hoang Phuc, Vo Nguyen Le Duy
arXiv AI
Sep 7

What Matters in On-Policy Distillation? A Perspective on Data Efficiency and Data Selection

The paper investigates data efficiency and selection in On‑Policy Distillation (OPD) for large language models. It shows that 1‑shot OPD—training on a single example—consistently improves performance, especially when the example is hard, and that longer chain‑of‑thought (CoT) paths drive the gains rather than token entropy. Based on these findings, the authors propose a simple hard‑example selection strategy that, using only eight carefully chosen hard examples, matches the performance of a 17,000‑example baseline across models from 1.5B to 7B parameters.

By Zhinan Hou, Jiaqi Zhang, Xunliang Cai, Keyou You