Different Teachers, Different Capabilities: Sub-1B On-Device Distillation for Structured Text Enrichment

Abstract: High-volume structured extraction pays a large model's latency on every item, so distilling the task into a small on-device model is attractive: comparable output at a fraction of the time and cost. We measure what that distillation actually delivers, per sub-task. Each news article is mapped to one JSON object with a short summary and five categorical labels. We distill an 8B reasoning teacher (deepseek-r1:8b) into a 0.6B student (Qwen3-0.6B; QLoRA, three seeds), and add two teacher controls: a same-size non-reasoning teacher and a larger managed pipeline. A blinded, reference-free, three-judge panel scores every arm against the full article, alongside two non-distillation baselines, few-shot prompting and constrained decoding. The student runs at about 0.8 s per article against the teacher's 39 s, and recovers 58% of the base-to-teacher gap on summary quality, beating its primary baseline (constrained decoding) by +16.8 points and few-shot prompting by a secondary +4.9. A same-size non-reasoning teacher trains a student no better than the untuned base, so the summary gain follows from the teacher's reasoning nature rather than its scale. Capabilities then split by teacher: the reasoning teacher transfers writing quality and the managed pipeline transfers label diversity, while a same-size instruction teacher's students stay more grounded on the 22 short, thin-source articles in the 93-item test set (74 versus 55 faithful), where the reasoning-lineage student fabricates. That grounding difference is a consistent ordering rather than a significant aggregate effect, and the subgroup is small, so we report it as a direction. Because no single engine wins every field, the deliverable is a per-field routing map for on-device enrichment.

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