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Knowledge Distillation: Large to Small

Train a small, fast model to mimic a large teacher — economics, pipeline, and quality filters for production distillation.

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Production5 min readFirst readWhen to Fine-Tune: The Decision Framework

After this section you can

  • Describe the teacher-student setup and what the student is actually learning from
  • Judge when distillation beats simply serving a smaller off-the-shelf model
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Knowledge Distillation: Large to Small

Train a small, fast model to mimic a large teacher model — the economics, pipeline, and quality filters for production distillation.

Knowledge distillation — a large teacher supervises a small student
Inputs unlabeled prompts TEACHER — large frozen · emits soft targets STUDENT — small training · mimics teacher Distillation loss KL(student ‖ teacher) + optional hard-label loss Small deployable 10–50× cheaper ~80–95% quality soft targets gradient → student

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