pace-intent-router-v8

Pace Intent Router v8

Summary

A 49.5M-parameter intent classifier trained from scratch on a 127K-example synthetic corpus for Pace's 7-class intent taxonomy. It runs in about 3–4 ms warm. On the earlier source-matched synthetic holdout it beat Qwen3-4B-Instruct, but that quality claim does not survive the fresh sealed benchmark below.

This is a posttrainllm-built specialist — trained with the train-extractor command on a ToolRouterModel medium preset (10 layers, 640 d_model, byte-level vocab 256). No pre-trained weights, no distillation from a teacher. The model learns Pace-specific decision boundaries from synthetic data generated by the Pace repository's scripts/generate-intent-corpus-v2.py.

Artifact

• Package id: pace-intent-router-v8
• Public artifact: posttrainllm/pace-intent-router-v8 on Hugging Face Hub
• Local copy: runs/pace-intent-router-v8.tinygpt (566 MB)
• Labels: runs/pace-intent-router-v8.tinygpt.labels.json
• Format: posttrainllm .tinygpt (ToolRouterModel checkpoint)
• Base: posttrainllm-ToolRouterModel-medium (trained from scratch)
• Params: 49.5M (10 layers, 640 d_model, 7 classes)
• Training method: train-extractor (cross-entropy classification, AdamW + cosine decay, 18000 steps on v5 data)

Measured Result

Official sealed V1 (2026-08-04)

The 63-instance, zero-overlap, frontier-qualified Everyday Specialist Benchmark reverses the old ordering:

Decision: reject v8 as the production winner on this task. It remains the latency floor, but the training generator did not cover enough fresh real-user-like phrasing. See evals/everyday-benchmark/pace-intent-sealed-v1.md.

The rest of this section is historical source-matched holdout evidence. It is useful for reproducing the factory run, not for an official win claim.

Head-to-head vs Qwen3-4B-Instruct (4-bit)

The router checkpoint is 566 MB on disk; no pinned Qwen artifact-size measurement is committed, so no size-delta claim is made.

Per-class accuracy (v8 vs v5 vs Qwen3-4B)

Historical holdout takeaways

1. +10.8 pp over Qwen3-4B on the source-matched holdout: this was a generator-distribution result, not a generalization result. Sealed V1 shows the 4B generalist ahead by 36.5 points.
2. 77x faster: 3.1ms vs 240ms. The router runs in sub-4ms on CPU; Qwen needs a full LLM forward pass.
3. Unknown detection did not generalize: the old synthetic holdout measured 79.6% unknown accuracy, but sealed V1 measured 55.6% unknown recall versus Qwen's 77.8%. The historical result is not a production reliability claim.
4. v5 vs v8: v5 (12K steps) slightly outperforms v8 (18K steps) overall (95.9% vs 95.5%), but v8 has a much better unknown class (79.6% vs 70.3%, +9.3 pp). The longer training improved the hardest class at a small cost to the easier ones.

Training data

• Dataset: pace-intent-corpus-v2 (fully synthetic)
• Source: generate-intent-corpus-v2.py (base corpus, combinatorial expansion) + generate-intent-supplement-v2.py (targeted weak-spot supplement), both in the sibling Pace repository
• Train rows: 112,061
• Heldout rows: 14,995
• Classes: 7 (chitchat, pureKnowledge, screenDescription, screenAction, research, phoneLargeModel, unknown)
• Split: stratified 85/15
• No real user data — all synthetic

Why synthetic data works here

The synthetic corpus encodes Pace-specific decision boundaries that a general LLM doesn't know:

• "turn on lights" = unknown (Pace can't control lights)
• "turn on volume" = screenAction (Pace can control volume)
• "what can you do" = pureKnowledge (not unknown — it's a question about Pace itself)

These boundaries are product-specific, not language-general. A from-scratch model learns them directly from the corpus; a general LLM needs few-shot examples or fine-tuning to learn them.

Recommended Use

This model is a router, not a planner. It classifies a user utterance into one of 7 intent classes in 3ms. The intent class determines which pipeline handles the turn:

Do not use this model for response generation. It only classifies.

Known Limits

• Unknown class is synthetic: the 79.6% unknown accuracy is measured on synthetic unknowns. Real-world unknown distribution will differ. The model needs real-world unknown examples to improve further.
• Not wired into Pace: the shipping app uses Apple FM for intent classification (when available) and rule-based fallback. This model is a training pipeline artifact, not a product component.
• Byte-level vocab: the model uses a 256-token byte-level vocabulary. Longer queries are truncated at 128 bytes. A BPE tokenizer would generalize better on longer queries.
• No real user data: all training data is synthetic. Real user queries will have different phrasings, accents, and edge cases.

Why this model exists

The Pace intent classifier was originally rule-based (hand-written phrase lists). This model was trained to test whether a learned classifier could beat the rules. It can — 95.5% vs the rules' ~95% on the synthetic eval — and it also beats Apple Foundation Models (3B, in-process) on the same task: 95.5% vs 76.5% on a 200-example stratified sample. The model is most useful as:

1. A latency baseline for a small, local intent classifier.
2. A study of synthetic-data generalization failures; sealed V1 rejected this checkpoint as a production winner.
3. A training pipeline validation (the corpus and pipeline are assets)
4. A baseline for future on-device classifiers

Measured head-to-head (200 stratified examples, 1s delay)

FM's main weakness: it conflates research with pureKnowledge (33.3% vs 93.4% — a 60pp gap) because it doesn't understand the Pace-specific distinction between "research X" (multi-step) and "what is X" (single answer). FM also refused to answer one query ("model refused to answer").

License and provenance

• Weights were trained from scratch by this repository's MIT-licensed train-extractor code; no pre-trained or third-party weights are included.
• Training data is a fully synthetic corpus generated by the Pace repository's own scripts (generate-intent-corpus-v2.py and generate-intent-supplement-v2.py); no external datasets or user data.
• The package is therefore distributed under MIT, matching the repository.

References

• Project and learning lab
• Source and Mac quickstart
• Sealed benchmark
• Canonical evaluation report
• Sealed frontier qualification receipt
• Corpus generators (generate-intent-corpus-v2.py, generate-intent-supplement-v2.py) and the Pace routing architecture (PaceIntentClassifier.swift) live in the sibling Pace repository, not this one. The earlier local factory-run receipts were not committed; the sealed V1 evaluation above is the authoritative public evidence.