The widespread adoption of cloud-based proprietary large language models (LLMs) has introduced significant challenges, including operational dependencies, privacy concerns, and the necessity of continuous internet connectivity. In this work, we introduce an LLMOps pipeline, “LlamaDuo”, for the seamless migration of knowledge and abilities from service-oriented LLMs to smaller, locally manageable models. This pipeline is crucial for ensuring service continuity in the presence of operational failures, strict privacy policies, or offline requirements. Our LlamaDuo involves fine-tuning a small language model against the service LLM using a synthetic dataset generated by the latter. If the performance of the fine-tuned model falls short of expectations, it is automatically improved through additional fine-tuning using extra similar data generated by the service LLM. This multi-turn process guarantees that the smaller model can eventually match or even surpass the service LLM’s capabilities in specific downstream tasks, offering a practical and scalable solution for managing AI deployments in constrained environments. Extensive experiments with leading-edge LLMs are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness, adaptability, and affordability of LlamaDuo across various downstream tasks. Our pipeline implementation is available at https://github.com/deep-diver/llamaduo.

Transformers have shown great success in learning representations for language modelling. However, an open challenge still remains on how to systematically aggregate semantic information (word embedding) with positional (or temporal) information (word orders). In this work, we propose a new architecture to aggregate the two sources of information using cascaded semantic and positional self-attention network (CSPAN) in the context of document classification. The CSPAN uses a semantic self-attention layer cascaded with Bi-LSTM to process the semantic and positional information in a sequential manner, and then adaptively combine them together through a residue connection. Compared with commonly used positional encoding schemes, CSPAN can exploit the interaction between semantics and word positions in a more interpretable and adaptive manner, and the classification performance can be notably improved while simultaneously preserving a compact model size and high convergence rate. We evaluate the CSPAN model on several benchmark data sets for document classification with careful ablation studies, and demonstrate the encouraging results compared with state of the art.