The paper presents a method for distilling tabular foundation models (TFMs) into lightweight, dataset‑specific students. By using the full labeled training set as teacher context and training students on both observed and synthetic queries, the authors achieve significant performance gains over traditional supervised models on TabArena and TALENT benchmarks. The distilled students also provide substantial inference speedups, reducing the cost of repeated inference.
By Minho Jeong, Dooho Lee, Jinmo Lee, Jaemin Yoo
arXiv:2402. 14035v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation from foundation models to compact domain models is challenging due to substantial gaps in capacity, architecture, and modality.
By Zichang Liu, Qingyun Liu, Yuening Li, Liang Liu, Anshumali Shrivastava, Shuchao Bi, Lichan Hong, Ed H. Chi, Zhe Zhao
arXiv:2509. 14257v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Model agents achieve strong performance on multi-step reasoning and tool-use tasks, but their impressive capabilities typically rely on extremely large backbones.
By Yuanjie Lyu, Chengyu Wang, Jun Huang, Tong Xu
arXiv:2606. 20138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs can personalize education, although current static-prompt tutoring systems struggle to adapt to diverse academic disciplines.
By Po-Chin Chang, Nicholas Hogan, Aske Plaat, Michiel T. van der Meer
arXiv:2606. 10369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) continue to scale, it becomes increasingly challenging to grow model capacity under fixed computation budgets.
By Xinyue Peng, Yi Qian, Jiaojiao Lin, Wenjian Shao, Yanming Liu
arXiv:2610.08778v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable problem solvers, but being able to solve a problem is not the same as being able to teach...
By Weixian Xu, Yanzhe Zhang, Zora Zhiruo Wang, Changyu Chen, Diyi Yang
arXiv:2603. 26556v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Converting a pretrained Transformer into a more efficient hybrid model through distillation offers a promising approach to reducing inference costs.
By Juan Gabriel Kostelec, Qinghai Guo
arXiv:2608. 00129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely utilized technique for transferring knowledge from a large model (the teacher) to a smaller model (the student).
By Tiancong Cheng, Ying Zhang, Zhiwen Yu, Yifang Yin, Bin Guo
arXiv:2609.01591v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: AI tutors are most useful when they adapt to each student's strengths, weaknesses, and preferred guidance, but evidence about which guidance works for...
By Ke Yang, Chenglong Wang, Michel Galley, Chandan Singh, Jeevana Priya Inala, ChengXiang Zhai, Jianfeng Gao
The paper introduces a recursive self-improvement framework for language models that replaces an external teacher with a frozen copy of the student, enabling dynamic co-evolution (DCE) and self-refined concise learning (SRCL). DCE allows the privileged teacher to evolve alongside the student, while SRCL trains on shorter, verified rewrites to reduce verbosity. Experiments show that the combined DCE+SRCL approach outperforms traditional on‑policy self‑distillation across multiple model sizes and math benchmarks, achieving significant accuracy gains and shorter outputs.
By Shangjian Yin, Zehao Zhao, Kavosh Asadi, Rui Liu, Yuchen Lu, Shike Mei, Hang Cui, Luke Simon, Zhouxing Shi, Hamed Firooz
arXiv:2607. 05734v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation in the recommendation domain is a necessary precursor to RL training, but raw teacher traces are ill-suited to this task.
By Haz Sameen Shahgir, Yufei Li, Frank Shyu, Luke Simon, Sandeep Pandey, Xi Liu, Yue Dong
arXiv:2608. 01522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Teaching a language model a skill it has not mastered is obstructed by three recurring difficulties: training data is scarce, ground-truth reasoning traces are usually unavailable, and models often exhibit an apparent ceiling beyond which additional data yields no further improvement.
By Longtian Bao, Jianyou Wang, Yang Zhang, Youze Zheng, Ramamohan Paturi