Training pipeline
Table with columns: Stage, Description| Stage | Description |
|---|
| Base | Qwen/Qwen3-8B-Base |
| SFT | Math + Search cold-start SFT, then Tau (tool-agent) SFT — student init Qwen3-8B-Base-Math-SeaSFT-Search-TauSFT-Tau |
| EOPD | On-policy distillation from a Search specialist teacher (Qwen3-8B-Base-Math-SeaSFT-Search) |
Method: Entropy-Aware On-Policy Distillation (EOPD)
EOPD combines two KL directions to get the best of mode-seeking and mode-covering distillation:
- Reverse-KL OPD everywhere (mode-seeking): the sampled-token log-ratio
student_logp − teacher_logp is subtracted from the advantage, sharpening the student
toward the teacher's modes.
- Forward-KL on high-entropy teacher tokens (mode-covering): where reverse KL alone
collapses diversity, a differentiable forward-KL loss
KL(p̃_teacher_topk ‖ p̃_student_topk) is added, gated by the teacher's per-token entropy
(1[H_teacher > τ]) and computed over the teacher's renormalized top-k (k=16) distribution.
The teacher is served with SGLang and returns both the scalar sampled-token logprob (reverse
KL) and the per-token top-k distribution + entropy (forward KL). Training was done with the
slime RL framework on Megatron-LM; this repo is the
Hugging Face safetensors export of the final checkpoint.
Architecture
Identical to Qwen3-8B-Base: 36 layers, hidden size 4096, 32 attention heads, 8 KV heads (GQA),
head dim 128, QK-LayerNorm, RMSNorm, SwiGLU, RoPE (θ=1e6), 151,936 vocab, 32,768 context.
Usage
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
model_id = "willhx/Qwen3-8B-Base-Math-SeaSFT-Search-EOPD-Tau"
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_id, torch_dtype="bfloat16", device_map="auto")
prompt = "Who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921?"
inputs = tok(prompt, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
out = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=256)
print(tok.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
The model is trained for a search/tool-use agent loop (Search-R1 style retrieval); to reproduce
the agentic behavior, drive it with the same tool prompt/format used during training.
License
Apache-2.0, inherited from Qwen3-8B-Base.