On-device research agents search a corpus, read sources, and write a cited brief on a personal laptop. Whether their citations are faithful, and at what cost, is unmeasured for a deployable small model. This study fixes one 4B generator on a 24 GB laptop and asks what makes its c…
High-volume structured extraction pays a large model's latency on every item, so distilling the task into a small on-device model is attractive: comparable output at a fraction of the time and cost. We measure what that distillation actually delivers, per sub-task. Each news arti…