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chore(distill): default to MODEL-1 7B teacher + SPEC-DISTILL-001 §86 (PMAT-701 follow-up)#1871

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chore(distill): default to MODEL-1 7B teacher + SPEC-DISTILL-001 §86 (PMAT-701 follow-up)#1871
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Summary

Now that PMAT-701 Bug A (#1863) and Bug B (#1869) have landed, the MODEL-1 7B teacher (`paiml/qwen2.5-coder-7b-apache-q4k-v1`) is feasible on Grace Blackwell GB10. This PR is the small `chore` change that flips the dispatch script default + records the why in SPEC-DISTILL-001 §86.

Changes

  • `scripts/dispatch-distill-phase-3-gx10.sh`: `TEACHER_REPO` default changes from `Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-0.5B-Instruct` (smoke fallback) → `paiml/qwen2.5-coder-7b-apache-q4k-v1` (the spec's intended teacher). Smoke-only callers override with `TEACHER_REPO=...`. Old comment about the 1.5B Block-0 OOM is replaced with the PMAT-701 fix references.
  • `docs/specifications/aprender-train/distillation-epic-spec.md`: new §86 amendment documenting the 5-whys, the two fixed bugs, the new falsifier `F-DISTILL-V2-001-TEACHER-DIVERGENCE` (preflight reject when STEPS>=5000 and teacher==student without an explicit override), and the discharge of the prior Stage D 50K + 10K runs as no-KD. Spec version bumped 1.1.0 → 1.2.0.

Why this matters

The Phase 4 Stage D 50K (25 h) and 10K (5 h) runs in 2026-05-20/21 silently inherited the Phase 3 smoke workaround of TEACHER_REPO == STUDENT_INIT == 0.5B. KD signal was ~zero (KL between identical distributions); 30 hours of compute fine-tuned the base model toward gibberish on a synthetic-ish corpus. The §86 amendment makes that mistake hard to repeat.

Test plan

  • `bash -n scripts/dispatch-distill-phase-3-gx10.sh` — syntax-ok
  • Spec markdown renders cleanly
  • CI: `ci / gate` + `workspace-test` green
  • Operator: when ready, re-dispatch Stage D with the new defaults — `STEPS=50000 ./scripts/dispatch-distill-phase-3-gx10.sh`. Compute estimate ~50 h on GB10 (slower than the previous 0.5B-teacher run because realizar's 7B forward is heavier; this is acceptable given the falsifier-quality gain).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

…(PMAT-701 follow-up)

The Phase 4 Stage D 50K + 10K runs (2026-05-20/21) silently inherited the
Phase 3 smoke workaround of TEACHER_REPO == STUDENT_INIT == 0.5B. Result: no
KD signal, 30 h of compute that fine-tuned the base model toward gibberish on
a small corpus. Documented in `evidence/distill-7b-teacher-loadtest-gx10/findings.json`
+ this spec amendment.

Now that PMAT-701 Bug A (PR #1863) and Bug B (PR #1869) have landed, the 7B
Q4K teacher is feasible on Grace Blackwell GB10:

* PR #1863: trueno-gpu allocator autodetects unified-memory devices (Grace,
  Tegra) and routes to cuMemAllocManaged so the full 128 GB pool is reachable.
* PR #1869: new RealizarQ4KTeacher keeps Q4K teacher weights quantized on
  the GPU (no F32 dequant at upload), eliminating the OOM-kill that was
  killing the first training step.

This PR flips the dispatch script's default and codifies the why in spec §86:

* `scripts/dispatch-distill-phase-3-gx10.sh` — TEACHER_REPO default changes
  from `Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-0.5B-Instruct` (smoke fallback) to
  `paiml/qwen2.5-coder-7b-apache-q4k-v1` (the MODEL-1 teacher the spec was
  designed around). Smoke-only callers override with the env var.
* `docs/specifications/aprender-train/distillation-epic-spec.md` — adds §86
  documenting the 5-whys, the fix references, and a new falsifier
  F-DISTILL-V2-001-TEACHER-DIVERGENCE that rejects future Phase-4-class
  dispatches where teacher == student unless an explicit override is set.
* Spec version bumped to 1.2.0 with changelog entry.

The §86 amendment also notes that the existing 50K + 10K Stage D runs do NOT
count toward AC-DISTILL-003 — they're discharged as no-KD baselines, and a
re-dispatched 50K run with the 7B teacher is required for a real Phase 4
verdict.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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