Thinking at the Right Size: Amortized Distillation Across Post-Trained LLMs
Practical deployment of large language models (LLMs) requires families of post-trained variants---instruction-tuned, reasoning-tuned, and chat-style models---each at multiple sizes to meet diverse latency and memory budgets. Producing each (variant, size) pair independently is prohibitive, so model families typically span only a handful of coarse-grained sizes per post-trained variant. Boomerang distillation (Kangaslahti et al., 2026) reduces this cost along the size axis for base models. Through model size interpolation, it constructs models of intermediate sizes from a single teacher-student pair without additional training. However, it still treats each post-trained variant as a separa...
| Authors | Yan Zhou, Sara Kangaslahti, Jonathan Geuter et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 24 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 August 2026 |
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