arXiv Machine Learning By Wenhui Chen, Zhifeng Li, Jie Zhou, Navan Preet Singh, Madalina Ciobanu, Chenghua Wang, Qingqing Mao, Ritankar Das

Train What You Deploy: Closing the MLP Reachability Gap in Low-Rank Clone Distillation

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper introduces a new approach to low‑rank clone distillation that ensures the student model’s training targets exactly the weights it will use at inference. By redefining the training objective to cover the full deployed matrix—without changing the model’s shape, parameter count, or FLOPs—the authors recover previously unreachable linear degrees of freedom. This results in significant performance gains across multiple teacher models, achieving comparable or superior accuracy with fewer tokens and parameters.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

arXiv AI
Oct 15

Beyond GRPO and On-Policy Distillation: An Empirical Sparse-to-Dense Reward Principle for Language-Model Post-Training

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By Yuanda Xu, Hejian Sang, Zhengze Zhou, Ran He, Zhipeng Wang, Alborz Geramifard
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Wiring Beats Blending: Structure-Aware Compensation for Transformer Downscaling

The paper investigates converting a large pretrained transformer (1.4 B parameters) into a smaller sibling (410 M) by studying representation alignment and parameter projection. It finds that dense weight projection destroys structure, and that a low‑budget, structure‑aware compensation—separating least‑squares function alignment from variance‑preserving rescaling—yields significant gains on token‑efficient training, outperforming subcloning and standard distillation pipelines at matched budgets.

By Ravi Satya Durga Prasad Yenugula
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 24

When does fusing hand-crafted knowledge with learned representations pay? A cost-normalized benchmark of stacking, substitution, and interference

arXiv:2608.21098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fusing prior knowledge with data-driven learning is attractive where data is scarce, yet no controlled account says when it helps, is redundant, or har...

By Ahmad AlMughrabi, Albert Clop, Benjamin Busam, Ricardo Marques, Petia Radeva