Keyword Harnesses Fail Open: A Cheap Diagnostic Ladder for Tool-Use Claims in Small Language Models

arXiv:2610.02142 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-10-01 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-10-01

Updated: 2026-10-01

Code: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp

Terminology

• Generalization — 29× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Embeddings — 25× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation — 17× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 17× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Trace — 9× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Decode — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Quantization — 4× in this paper · explained in 12 episodes
• Adam — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Reasoning Traces — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Sparsity — 3× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Accuracy — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Core — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Cosine Similarity — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Distillation — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Failure Modes — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Instruction Tuning — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Perplexity — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Catastrophic Forgetting — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing — 1× in this paper
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Grounding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Provenance — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Tokenization — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Visual Grounding — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone
• To Code, or Not To Code? Exploring Impact of Code in Pre-training
• SmolLM2: When Smol Goes Big -- Data-Centric Training of a Small Language Model
• Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs
• VectraYX-Nano: A 42M-Parameter Spanish Cybersecurity Language Model with Curriculum Learning and Native Tool Use
• VectraYX-Vision-1B: A Sub-2B Spanish/LATAM Cybersecurity Vision-Language Model, and What Limits Its Visual Grounding
• GLU Variants Improve Transformer

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