Specialist language models are usually understood through endpoint gains: the generalist scores lower, the specialist scores higher, and the difference is treated as evidence of specialization. This leaves the released update itself largely unexamined. We propose a paired weight-delta path audit and apply it to two public, aligned generalist-to-medical-specialist checkpoint pairs: Gemma-3-4B-IT to MedGemma-4B-IT and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct to HuatuoGPT-o1-7B. In both pairs, the full decoder-side update strongly reconstructs measured medical benchmark movement (0.974 and 1.183 endpoint-normalized retention), making each decoder delta an appropriate substrate for the audit. Yet the movement is not cleanly localized. MLP is the strongest broad component family in both pairs, but mixed off-domain movements, 10-seed matched controls, and endpoint-anchored rollbacks prevent a unique coarse-family explanation. The audit therefore separates update-level reconstruction from component-level explanation. Its claims concern text-only multiple-choice benchmark movement, not clinical validation, repair, or circuit-level mechanism.
Nowadays, large multilingual translation models demonstrate impressive translation capabilities in the machine translation benchmarks. This raises a practical question to the developers: is it worth developing translation models specialized for a particular language pair if you only need to support that language pair? To give an anecdotal answer to this question, we develop a family of small language models (0.8B, 1.4B, 3.3B, and 7B parameters) specialized for Japanese-English bidirectional translation. We employ a two-stage supervised fine-tuning approach followed by Multi-Objective GRPO (Ichihara et al. 2025) to train models on synthetically generated parallel corpora. We evaluate our models on WMT and real-world translation benchmarks across business, legal, medical, financial, and patent domains. While multilingual models achieve strong performance on WMT benchmarks, our compact models outperform them on real-world benchmarks, suggesting the practical utility of developing specialized translation models even in the era of large multilingual models.
Large language models increasingly require specialization across diverse domains, yet existing approaches struggle to balance multi-domain capacities with strict memory and inference constraints. In this work, we introduce SkillWeave, a modular improvement framework that enables LLMs to specialize under fixed memory budgets. SkillWeave partitions full capabilities of a general-purpose model into skillpacks -- lightweight, domain-specific delta modules -- that reorganize and refine the model's internal knowledge. For efficient deployment, SkillWeave integrates SkillZip to compress skillpacks into compact and inference-ready format, enabling strong multi-domain performance with low-latency execution. On multi-task and agentic benchmarks, a 9B SkillWeave model outperforms several baselines and even surpasses a 32B monolithic LLM, while achieving up to 4x speedup.