Compiling Expert Procedures into Verified Programs: When a Small Model Is Enough

Key points

• We build an explicit program from a teacher's traces and run it in front of unchanged small models, including an 8B model.1
• The construction, PLVR , takes the reasoning traces of a teacher, Kimi-K3, clusters their segments to locate recurring operations, has a frontier model author one typed primitive per operation, each run by a small frozen model and assembles the program by A search over a mined rule library, under a reference-action objective.1
• At inference the program takes one of two forms: for troubleshooting and tool search it produces the chain of thought the student would otherwise generate for itself, and the student acts on it; for multi-turn tool matching the student proposes each action and the program checks, repairs, or retries it before it goes out.1
• With Granite-4.2-8B as the student, the program is within 2 to 3 points of the Nemotron students on Telecom and within 3 on Retail, and 3 to 13 points below them on LiveMCPBench: where the domain is procedural an 8B student is enough, and on tool search the student still matters.1

Sources (1)

• [1]Compiling Expert Procedures into Verified Programs: When a Small Model Is Enough
  arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 13, 08:12 PM

  In procedural tool-use domains, how much of the gap between base models is procedure rather than capability?

  We build an explicit program from a teacher's traces and run it in front of unchanged small models, including an 8B model.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.