Massive success with both CaptionBert-v2 variants. They are both standalone and independent students with a similar residual effect.
https://huggingface.co/AbstractPhil/captionbert-8192-v2
https://huggingface.co/AbstractPhil/captionbert-8192-v2-b
This marks the end of the Bert teacher/student preprocessing for captionbert until a large discovery or innovation is discovered based on the AMOE research. In that case I may need the features in the future, but for now they are only necessary for analysis and potential ablation.
There are a few limitations.
CaptionBert-V2-B doesn't understand how to use V2-A's AMOE arms as effectively as A, and vise-versa. However, they ARE compliant with their twin's arms. All of which were trained independent of each other.
The core difference between the two was a logistics problem. Not all the ModernBert features landed. Some silently OOM'd and the audit slipped through the cracks. Once I approached it, I trained a model with the missing shards omitting the other teachers as well - so about 8m missing features or so.
B was issued the full corpus, which showed the full corpus didn't enhance the outcome for the base student. The structure was done with the data already and the cosine similarity mildly improved, pre-AMOE introduction.
The REAL strength came from attaching the AMOE systems to the B. They defeated A's benchmarks and pushed closer to MiniLM. A couple of out of scope too-small datasets were used, dropped a little between A and B, so there's legitimate differences for out of scope usage that have been unaddressed.
I'm not using MiniLM as a teacher, primarily because I want to have a legitimate industry-used marker as something to target.