Inference Flow & Teacher’s Role

[minamonaa]

Hi! I really enjoyed your work on distilling RAG capabilities into Small LMs 🙌

Two quick questions:

1. During inference, is the context (evidence/graph) for the Small LM always generated by the Teacher?
2. Should I understand the teacher as effectively serving the retriever’s role, with the core contribution being that the teacher’s knowledge is distilled into the small LM via the evidence/graph process?

Thanks for clarifying!