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cs.CL2026
Breaking the Token Ceiling: Distilling Smaller, Stronger Byte Models
Kalyani Marathe, Artidoro Pagnoni, Tomasz Limisiewicz +4
Small models are made more capable through distillation from a larger one that shares their tokenization scheme. However, do distilled byte and token models behave similarly in ter…
cs.CL2026
Knowledge Distillation During Mid-Training Favors Reasoning over Factual Recall
Jacqueline He, Howard Yen, Shuyue Stella Li +9
Logit-based knowledge distillation (KD) is used to train smaller language models (LMs) via supervision from stronger teachers, but whether its benefits are consistent across traini…
cs.CL2026
Compute Optimal Tokenization
Tomasz Limisiewicz, Artidoro Pagnoni, Srini Iyer +6
Scaling laws enable the optimal selection of data amount and language model size, yet the impact of the data unit, the token, on this relationship remains underexplored. In this wo…