mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

MobileLLM-Pro Technical Report

arXiv 2511.06719 ↗First posted 10 Nov 2025cs.LGcited by 3

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

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  3. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,715
  4. 2015Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Networkcited by 10,324
  5. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,320
  6. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 8,065
  7. 2020Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understandingcited by 7,963
  8. 2018Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challengecited by 4,886
  9. 2019HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?cited by 4,100
  10. 2021Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learnerscited by 3,780
  11. 2021Program Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 3,637
  12. 2020Longformer: The Long-Document Transformercited by 3,413
20 more
  1. 2017TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehensioncited by 2,955
  2. 2019PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Languagecited by 2,883
  3. 2019BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questionscited by 2,183
  4. 2018Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answeringcited by 2,164
  5. 2022GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformerscited by 1,919
  6. 2020Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequencescited by 1,684
  7. 2017Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inferencecited by 1,593
  8. 2023GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpointscited by 1,346
  9. 2023Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Modelscited by 1,228
  10. 2018Averaging Weights Leads to Wider Optima and Better Generalizationcited by 1,209
  11. 2019TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understandingcited by 1,167
  12. 2019Learned Step Size Quantizationcited by 628
  13. 2018Quantizing deep convolutional networks for efficient inference: A whitepapercited by 521
  14. 2021A White Paper on Neural Network Quantizationcited by 472
  15. 2023LLM-QAT: Data-Free Quantization Aware Training for Large Language Modelscited by 324
  16. 2016Using the Output Embedding to Improve Language Modelscited by 272
  17. 2024MobileLLM: Optimizing Sub-billion Parameter Language Models for On-Device Use Casescited by 223
  18. 2023RewriteLM: An Instruction-Tuned Large Language Model for Text Rewritingcited by 67
  19. 2021TLDR9+: A Large Scale Resource for Extreme Summarization of Social Media Postscited by 10
  20. 2025AutoMixer: Checkpoint Artifacts as Automatic Data Mixerscited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024MobileAIBench: Benchmarking LLMs and LMMs for On-Device Use Cases
  2. 2024On-Device Language Models: A Comprehensive Review
  3. 2026EdgeFlow: Fast Cold Starts for LLMs on Mobile Devices ↗
  4. 2024MobileQuant: Mobile-friendly Quantization for On-device Language Models
  5. 2025Optimizing LLMs Using Quantization for Mobile Execution
  6. 2026The Battery Price of edge AI: A study of the Environmental Impact of LLM Inference on Mobile Devices
  7. 2023Revolutionizing Mobile Interaction: Enabling a 3 Billion Parameter GPT LLM on Mobile
  8. 2024MELTing point: Mobile Evaluation of Language Transformers