Distilling Kimi Delta Attention Into Afm 4 5b And The Tool We Used To Do It
Source
Arcee AI
Author
Arcee AI
Date
Terms in this piece · Glossary
attention — The mechanism that lets a model weigh which earlier words matter for the word it's currently processing — the core operation of a transformer.
distillation — Training a small, cheap model to imitate a big one's outputs, keeping much of the capability at a fraction of the cost.
context window — The maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.
pretraining — The first, biggest phase of building a model: training it on enormous amounts of text so it learns language, facts, and reasoning in general.
Why it matters
You can retrofit a linear-attentionThe mechanism that lets a model weigh which earlier words matter for the word it's currently processing — the core operation of a transformer.Full definition → variant onto an existing pretrained model by distillationTraining a small, cheap model to imitate a big one's outputs, keeping much of the capability at a fraction of the cost.Full definition → instead of pretrainingThe first, biggest phase of building a model: training it on enormous amounts of text so it learns language, facts, and reasoning in general.Full definition → from scratch, and this documents the concrete steps, weight initialisation choices and long-context windowThe maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.Full definition → finetune that make the conversion hold up.
