arXiv:2606. 13221v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating new large language models typically requires costly human annotation campaigns at scale.
By Bora Kargi, David Salinas
CaSKG introduces a counterfactual‑causal skill graph framework that calibrates procedural relations before retrieval, building a high‑recall directed candidate graph from semantic, lexical, input/output, and structural evidence and refining it with repair evidence and optional LLM judgment. The framework applies direction‑conditioned textual counterfactual probes—removing, substituting, and reordering skill pairs—to aggregate evidence with Bayesian smoothing, producing a state‑filtered weighted graph for task‑conditioned expansion. Evaluated across six LLM backbones on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld, CaSKG outperforms existing Graph‑of‑Skills methods, improving macro‑average scores and reducing mean environment steps while preserving essential skill dependencies.
By Zhiyuan Li, Linyuan Gao, Xuechun Ding, Hongwei Chen, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
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
GEAR is a two‑stage framework that distills tabular foundation models into lightweight MLP or tree‑based predictors for efficient CPU deployment. In the first stage, synthetic covariates are used as teacher‑query locations to train the student on soft TFM targets, expanding coverage beyond observed rows. The second stage re‑anchors the student to the target distribution using real labels and out‑of‑fold teacher predictions, preventing self‑labeling leakage and improving performance. Experiments on TALENT and TabArena show that GEAR‑distilled MLPs outperform supervised MLPs by up to 2.00 AUC points on binary tasks and 1.35 on multiclass tasks, and also outperform CatBoost, while dramatically reducing inference time and memory usage.
By Qi Qin, Jiajie Zhu, Dali Chen, Yuzhao Zhang, Jia-Xing Han, Yu Su, Peng Zhang, Ying Yan, Yifan Sun
CALIBURN is a new approach to large language model (LLM) unlearning that measures a model’s confidence in undesirable knowledge and uses this measure to fine‑tune unlearning gradient updates. By doing so, it offers more precise control over what is forgotten while better preserving the model’s overall utility. Experiments on benchmarks such as MUSE and WMDP show that CALIBURN outperforms existing methods in balancing knowledge removal with utility retention.
By Zhengbang Yang, Yisheng Zhong, Junyuan Hong, Zhuangdi Zhu
QVAC Genesis III is a 191.43 B‑token synthetic STEM corpus covering 19 domains and multiple difficulty levels, created through a dual generation strategy that uses a weak edge‑scale student model to generate corrective explanations and contrastive reasoning. The authors evaluate the corpus with an LLM‑as‑a‑parser protocol and demonstrate that 1.7 B‑parameter models trained on QVAC Genesis III outperform those trained on Cosmopedia‑v2 and the Cosmo‑1B model on ARC, GPQA Diamond, and MMLU STEM benchmarks, achieving up to +28.57% improvement on ARC‑E and a 99.45% valid answer rate.
By Davide Vitabile, N. Ranjan, Akshay Nambiar, Kamal K. Gupta, Amril Nazir