Can abstract concepts from LLM improve SLM performance?

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteur principal: Tandon, Siddharth
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Tandon, Siddharth
author_facet Tandon, Siddharth
contents Large language models (LLMs) excel at diverse tasks, but their deployment on resource-constrained devices remains challenging. Existing methods like quantization, pruning, and distillation can reduce memory footprint but often demand extensive experimentation and careful infrastructure design. Leveraging existing techniques for extracting high-level concepts (represented as steering vectors) from larger models, we investigate their transferability to smaller language models (SLM) during inference. We demonstrate through extensive experimentation that these concepts can be effectively transferred to smaller models, irrespective of their family (e.g., Phi, Llama, Qwen), leading to performance improvements across a wide range of tasks. Furthermore, we introduce inference-time scaling to enhance performance by dynamically adjusting the steering intensity which has resulted in a 7-15\% of accuracy improvement for Qwen3-0.6B.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_19069
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can abstract concepts from LLM improve SLM performance?
Tandon, Siddharth
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) excel at diverse tasks, but their deployment on resource-constrained devices remains challenging. Existing methods like quantization, pruning, and distillation can reduce memory footprint but often demand extensive experimentation and careful infrastructure design. Leveraging existing techniques for extracting high-level concepts (represented as steering vectors) from larger models, we investigate their transferability to smaller language models (SLM) during inference. We demonstrate through extensive experimentation that these concepts can be effectively transferred to smaller models, irrespective of their family (e.g., Phi, Llama, Qwen), leading to performance improvements across a wide range of tasks. Furthermore, we introduce inference-time scaling to enhance performance by dynamically adjusting the steering intensity which has resulted in a 7-15\% of accuracy improvement for Qwen3-0.6B.
title Can abstract concepts from LLM improve SLM performance?
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19069