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feat: add distillation-specific checkpoint management
Add dedicated checkpoint management for knowledge distillation training without polluting IFullModel with additional interface requirements. ## Design Decision **Question**: Should we add ICheckpointableModel to IFullModel? **Answer**: No - create specialized checkpoint manager instead **Reasoning**: 1. IFullModel already inherits 7 interfaces - adding more violates Interface Segregation 2. Not all models support checkpointing (stateless models, non-serializable state) 3. IModelSerializer already provides similar file-based functionality 4. Distillation-specific needs (curriculum state, teacher/student pairs) don't belong in IFullModel ## New Components ### DistillationCheckpointConfig Configuration for checkpoint management: - Save frequency (every N epochs or batches) - Keep best N checkpoints (automatic pruning) - Which models to save (teacher, student, or both) - Curriculum state preservation - Metric tracking (validation loss, accuracy, etc.) ### DistillationCheckpointManager<T> Handles checkpoint operations: - Automatic saving based on schedule - Best checkpoint selection by metric - Multi-stage distillation support (student → teacher) - Curriculum learning state management - Training resumption after interruptions - Batch-level checkpointing for long epochs ### Key Features 1. **Automatic Checkpoint Pruning** - Keep only best N checkpoints based on validation metric - Save disk space while preserving important models 2. **Multi-Stage Distillation** - Save student from Stage 1 - Load as teacher for Stage 2 - Support progressive compression (large → medium → small) 3. **Curriculum State Preservation** - Save curriculum progress with checkpoint - Resume from correct curriculum stage - Don't restart from "easy samples" 4. **Flexible Checkpointing** - Epoch-based or batch-based - Stream-based via ICheckpointableModel - File-based via IModelSerializer - Custom metrics for best checkpoint selection ## Usage Example ```csharp var config = new DistillationCheckpointConfig { CheckpointDirectory = "./checkpoints", SaveEveryEpochs = 5, KeepBestN = 3, SaveStudent = true }; var manager = new DistillationCheckpointManager<double>(config); for (int epoch = 0; epoch < 100; epoch++) { // Train... double validationLoss = Evaluate(student); manager.SaveCheckpointIfNeeded( epoch: epoch, student: student, metrics: new Dictionary<string, double> { { "validation_loss", validationLoss } } ); } // Load best checkpoint manager.LoadBestCheckpoint(student); ``` ## Documentation Added CHECKPOINTING_GUIDE.md with: - Why checkpointing matters for distillation - Architecture overview - 5 detailed usage examples - Best practices - Common patterns (early stopping, multi-stage, resumption) ## Benefits - ✅ Separation of concerns (checkpointing separate from model interface) - ✅ Distillation-specific features (curriculum state, teacher/student pairs) - ✅ Production-ready (automatic pruning, resumption, multi-stage support) - ✅ Flexible (works with any ICheckpointableModel) - ✅ Doesn't pollute IFullModel interface Resolves checkpoint management requirements for knowledge distillation
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