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:2605. 03677v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for consolidating the capabilities of specialized expert models into a single student model.
By Wenjin Hou, Shangpin Peng, Weinong Wang, Zheng Ruan, Yue Zhang, Zhenglin Zhou, Mingqi Gao, Yifei Chen, Kaiqi Wang, Hongming Yang, Chengquan Zhang, Zhuotao Tian, Han Hu, Yi Yang, Fei Wu, Hehe Fan
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
Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across many tasks, but their high computational cost limits deployment in resource-constrained environments. Knowledge Distillation (KD) offers a practical solution by transferring knowledge from a teacher model of a larger size to a smaller student model.
OPDSearch+ introduces a two‑stage distillation framework for search‑augmented reasoning that eliminates the need for task‑specific teacher fine‑tuning. In the first stage, a frozen off‑the‑shelf instruct model guides a student through live search interactions using a per‑position forward KL objective, transferring reasoning decomposition and evidence integration skills. The second stage refines this student with reinforcement learning, achieving performance surpassing RL alone and outperforming all prior 3B‑parameter baselines on seven QA benchmarks, including 13.1% improvement on HotpotQA and 8.5% on 2WikiMultihopQA.
By Qinglin Ye, Zhiyuan Gu, Jingjie Xia, Yiheng Zhang, Kaiyan Zhao, Shunchao Zheng, Yuhang Mu, Wenchao Du, Yiming Wang
arXiv:2609.13199v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Knowledge distillation aims to improve the performance of lightweight student models by transferring knowledge from larger and more powerful teacher mo...
By Dawen Jiang, Zhishu Shen, Zeyu Liu, Tiehua Zhang