Tag: distillation
All the articles with the tag "distillation".
Knowledge Distillation: Learning from a Teacher's Distribution
Updated:A teacher's full next-token distribution carries far more information per example than the one token the text used. Soft labels and dark knowledge on a real teacher, temperature and the tau-squared factor derived and checked, forward vs reverse KL on a bimodal target, sequence-level and on-policy distillation, and distilled reasoning. Then Qwen2.5-0.5B trained on this blog from hard labels, from a 1.5B teacher's distribution, and from both, two seeds each, with what each learns and forgets.
Small and Specialized Models: When Not to Use a Frontier LLM
Updated:Most production model calls don't need a frontier model, and many don't need text at all: they need a decision. What small means in memory and speed, worked out and checked against a measurement; how small models stay capable (data, overtraining, distillation); and an experiment on this series' own question router, where a 23-million-parameter encoder beats a 1.5-billion-parameter language model on accuracy and calibration, and on speed on an Apple M4 laptop, measured with bootstrap intervals and a careful readout of the language model. Then System One decision models, which return typed answers with probabilities instead of text, with a vendor's claims labeled as such.