le-harnais-ft-ornith-scaffold-3b

le-harnais / ft-ornith-scaffold-3b

A scaffold-generation student: given a coding/agent task it emits a short numbered plan of subgoals, each tagged with how to verify it. Distilled (plain full-FT SFT) from the ornith:35b teacher's self-scaffolds, so a small local model can produce the structured plans that le-harnais's lh harness self-scaffold step executes and verifies.

• Base model: meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct — Built with Llama; Llama 3.2 Community License applies.
• Class: hero
• Teacher: ornith:9b/ornith:35b family (MIT) — scaffolds generated by ornith:35b.
• Training data: 153 (task → verify-tagged numbered plan) pairs from the teacher (38 held-out).
• Headline (held-out, n=38, vs the base): token-F1 vs teacher 0.295 (base 0.170, +0.125); scaffold-structure score 0.731 (base 0.577, +0.153).

Why it exists

le-harnais's thesis is don't trust raw model text — generate, verify, repair. Ornith's "self-improving" RL learns to propose its own search scaffold; we can't reproduce that RL on one GPU, but we can distill the scaffolding behavior into a cheap local model. This student is the result: it drives the inference-time --self-scaffold path (which on a weak policy halved escalation in an A/B), with no RL and no remote model.

Reproduce

# 1. corpus from the teacher, 2. full-FT distill, 3. held-out bench
python tools/gen_ornith_scaffold_corpus.py --n 160 --eval 40 --out datasets/ornith_scaffold
BASE=meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct OUT=refs/llm-jepa/ft-ornith-scaffold-3b \
  tools/distill_ornith_scaffold.sh
python tools/bench_scaffold.py --student refs/llm-jepa/ft-ornith-scaffold-3b \
  --base meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct --eval datasets/ornith_scaffold_eval.jsonl

Full context: docs/ornith-self-improving.md (D1–D4) and docs/local-coding-agents-bench.md in the [le-harnais] repo. Serve with transformers or le-harnais lh-serve/candle.

Distilling a teacher's scaffolding skill into a small student: structure and plan quality transfer; this is behavior distillation, not the teacher's RL.