MobileLLM-Pro Technical Report
On the map: Knowledge distillation → Knowledge distillation for LLMs
Abstract (arXiv)
Efficient on-device language models around 1 billion parameters are essential for powering low-latency AI applications on mobile and wearable devices. However, achieving strong performance in this model class, while supporting long context windows and practical deployment remains a significant challenge. We introduce MobileLLM-Pro, a 1-billion-parameter language model optimized for on-device deployment. MobileLLM-Pro achieves state-of-the-art results across 11 standard benchmarks, significantly outperforming both Gemma 3-1B and Llama 3.2-1B, while supporting context windows of up to 128,000 tokens and showing only minor performance regressions at 4-bit quantization. These improvements are enabled by four core innovations: (1) implicit positional distillation, a novel technique that effectively instills long-context capabilities through knowledge distillation; (2) a specialist model merging framework that fuses multiple domain experts into a compact model without parameter growth; (3) simulation-driven data mixing using utility estimation; and (4) 4-bit quantization-aware training with self-distillation. We release our model weights and code to support future research in efficient on-device language models.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Knowledge distillation for LLMs, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation. Builds on 32 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2025.
Builds on
32 of 41 references.
References · 32
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20 more
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- 2019PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Languagecited by 2,883
- 2019BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questionscited by 2,183
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- 2020Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequencescited by 1,684
- 2017Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inferencecited by 1,593
- 2023GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpointscited by 1,346
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- 2016Using the Output Embedding to Improve Language Modelscited by 272
- 2024MobileLLM: Optimizing Sub-billion Parameter Language Models for On-Device Use Casescited by 223
- 2023RewriteLM: An Instruction-Tuned Large Language Model for Text Rewritingcited by 67
- 2021TLDR9+: A Large Scale Resource for Extreme Summarization of Social Media Postscited by 10
- 2025AutoMixer: Checkpoint Artifacts as Automatic Data Mixerscited by 4
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2024MobileAIBench: Benchmarking LLMs and LMMs for On-Device Use Cases
- 2024On-Device Language Models: A Comprehensive Review
- 2026EdgeFlow: Fast Cold Starts for LLMs on Mobile Devices ↗
- 2024MobileQuant: Mobile-friendly Quantization for On-device Language Models
- 2025Optimizing LLMs Using Quantization for Mobile Execution
- 2026The Battery Price of edge AI: A study of the Environmental Impact of LLM Inference on Mobile Devices
- 2023Revolutionizing Mobile Interaction: Enabling a 3 Billion Parameter GPT LLM on Mobile
- 2024MELTing point: Mobile Evaluation of Language Transformers