Distilling Foundation Models for Agentic What-If Reasoning:Cost, Latency, and Governance in a Hybrid LLM+SLM Architecture
Mirrored from arXiv — Machine Learning for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Machine Learning
Title:Distilling Foundation Models for Agentic What-If Reasoning:Cost, Latency, and Governance in a Hybrid LLM+SLM Architecture
Abstract:Tabular foundation models deliver strong zero-training predictive performance via in-context learning, but their high inference latency makes them impractical as hot-path decision backends in interactive agentic loops. We distill a TabPFN teacher into a compact feed-forward student across a business-decision simulation on UCI Adult and five OpenML benchmarks: the classification head compresses 53.2M parameters to 8,546 (6,220x); the deployed two-head loan pipeline compresses 111.4M parameters to 17,059 (6,532x). The student retains 95.4-100.5% accuracy and 96.8-100.0% AUC, with the lowest accuracy retention on credit-g at 95.4%; an alpha = 0 hard-label control shows that the teacher's soft targets provide a 2.1-7.0 AUC point gain.
| Comments: | 13 pages, 1 figure, 7 tables |
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.16091 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2609.16091v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.16091
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
References & Citations
Bookmark
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — Machine Learning
-
Stable and Faithful Explanations for Knowledge Tracing
Sep 25
-
SMILESGNN: Interpretable Clinical Toxicity Prediction via SMILES-Graph Cross-Attention Fusion
Sep 25
-
CFD Correction of Open Tip Clearance Flow in a Compressor Cascade Using VAE Latent Space Adaptation
Sep 25
-
CARE: Condition-Aware Representation Regularization for Diffusion Models
Sep 25
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.