Definition
Knowledge distillation trains a smaller “student” model to mimic the outputs of a larger “teacher,” producing a much cheaper model that retains a large fraction of the teacher’s capability. It’s the standard way labs convert a flagship model into a deployable lineup.
Episodes covering this
- 206How Four-Second Clips Become Hours of Playable AI SoccerMultiplayer Interactive World Models with Representation Autoencoders· ·15 min·Jul 07, 2026
- 200The One Mechanism That Turns Twenty AI Clones Into an Actual TeamEVOCHAMBER: Test-Time Co-evolution of Multi-Agent System at Individual, Team, and Population ScalesZhang, Xu, Dai et al. · Oregon State University; AG2AI·19 min·Jul 04, 2026
- 192A 32B Open Model Matched Frontier Systems By Learning to Take NotesAutoMem: Automated Learning of Memory as a Cognitive SkillWu, Zhu, Zhang et al. · Stanford University·22 min·Jul 02, 2026
- 189Why Phone Agents Ace the Test and Crash on Your Actual PhoneXiaomi-GUI-0 Technical ReportTeam, Qu, Luan · Xiaomi·24 min·Jul 02, 2026
- 186How a Frozen Model Went From 2% to 77% on Physics Puzzles — Without RetrainingHierarchical Experimentalist AgentsChandra, Vaidyanathan, Dhanuka et al. · University of Massachusetts Amherst·22 min·Jun 30, 2026
- 168When Turning Experience Into Code Makes Your AI Agent DumberMetis: Bridging Text and Code Memory for Self-Evolving AgentsDai, He, Li et al. · The Chinese University of Hong Kong·27 min·Jun 24, 2026
- 163Why Training Only on Perfect Solutions Cripples a Model's ReasoningProvable Benefits of RLVR over SFT for Reasoning Models: Learning to Backtrack EfficientlyWei, Kim · Princeton University·22 min·Jun 23, 2026
- 156Why More Human Demonstrations Made a Computer-Use Agent WorseProCUA-SFT Technical ReportJung, Lu, Cui et al. · NVIDIA / University of Washington·20 min·Jun 18, 2026
- 155Why a Flawless Demo Makes a Worse Computer-Using Agent, And the FixSkill-Guided Continuation Distillation for GUI AgentsFan, Yu, Shen et al. · StepFun·22 min·Jun 18, 2026
- 145Building Forgetting Into a Language Model With One Extra Line of CodeNatively Unlearnable Large Language ModelsGhosal, Maini, Raghunathan · Carnegie Mellon University·22 min·Jun 15, 2026
- 142Training a Tiny Model to Run the Plumbing Between an Agent and the WorldHarnessBridge: Learnable Bidirectional Controller for LLM Agent HarnessWang, Wang, Taylor et al. · University of California·24 min·Jun 12, 2026
- 127What Diffusion Language Models Were Missing: A Map, Not an AlgorithmTextLDM: Language Modeling with Continuous Latent DiffusionJiang, Ren, Li et al. · JoyFuture Academy / HIT·30 min·Jun 11, 2026
- 126How Coding Agents Can Mine Their Own Failures Into a Self-Targeting CurriculumSocratic-SWE: Self-Evolving Coding Agents via Trace-Derived Agent SkillsXiao, Jiao, Wang et al. · Shanghai Jiao Tong University·21 min·Jun 09, 2026
- 111How a 4B Web Agent Beat Models 60x Its Size on 500 DemonstrationsOpenWebRL: Demystifying Online Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning for Visual Web AgentsYang, Wu, Chen et al. · UIUC·24 min·Jun 03, 2026
- 106Giving Agents a Notebook Instead of New Weights: How ExpGraph Lets Frozen Models LearnExpGraph: Model-Agnostic Experience Learning with Graph-Structured Memory for LLM AgentsFeng, Ye, Luo et al. · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign·26 min·Jun 02, 2026
- 099How an Open-Book Trick Teaches a Model to Catch Its Own MistakesSelf-Trained Verification for Training- and Test-Time Self-ImprovementWu, Raghunathan · Carnegie Mellon University·21 min·May 29, 2026
- 083Training the Translator: How a Small Communication Model Lets Agent Teams Outperform ThemselvesAgentFugue: Agent Scaling for Long-Horizon Tasks through Collective ReasoningHu, Qian, Wang et al. · GSAI·24 min·May 26, 2026
- 082Training a Deep Research Agent on 8,000 Synthetic Tasks: The Rubric Tree TrickQUEST: Training Frontier Deep Research Agents with Fully Synthetic TasksXie, Lin, Wang et al. · The Ohio State University·31 min·May 26, 2026
- 078Training a Markdown File: When LLM Self-Improvement Borrows the Discipline of Neural Net TrainingSkillOpt: Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent SkillsYang, Gong, Huang et al. · Microsoft·28 min·May 25, 2026
- 066Why Giving an AI Agent More Tools Can Make It Worse at Using a ComputerToolCUA: Towards Optimal GUI-Tool Path Orchestration for Computer Use AgentsHu, Zhang, Xu et al. · Tongyi Lab·26 min·May 22, 2026
- 047When Agent Benchmarks Lie: The Harness Problem in Open-Source AIOrchard: An Open-Source Agentic Modeling FrameworkPeng, Yao, Wu et al. · Microsoft Research·28 min·May 15, 2026
- 041When the Iteration Teaches the Model to Skip the IterationSolve the Loop: Attractor Models for Language and ReasoningFein-Ashley, Rashidinejad · University of Southern California·30 min·May 13, 2026
- 017When the Agent Grades Its Own Homework: A Brutal New Benchmark for AI WorkersGym-Anything: Turn any Software into an Agent EnvironmentAggarwal, Neubig, Welleck · CMU·31 min·May 03, 2026
- 013Why Search Keeps Rediscovering the Same Workflow, and What That MeansWhy Search When You Can Transfer? Amortized Agentic Workflow Design from Structural PriorsDu, Liu, Du et al. · Carnegie Mellon University·22 min·May 03, 2026