Artifact Distillation: Training-Free Transfer from Frontier to Small Language Models
arXiv:2610.37680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Closing the gap between frontier and smaller language models is usually approached by distillation: fine-tuning the small model (student) on a frontier model's (teacher) outputs, which binds transfer to training compute and leaves the transferred knowledge largely opaque. We propose Artifact Distillation: a teacher solves training instances and externalizes its problem-solving procedure into an artifact bank that a student queries at inference time, with no gradient updates. Across four LiveBench tasks, a bank written by Claude Opus 4.5 lets Claude Haiku 4.5 outperform unaided Claude Sonnet 4.5 on spatial reasoning (0.707 vs. 0.647) at 60% of its cost, and reach Sonnet 4.5's level on table joining at 89% of its cost. The same raw bank raises