Compiling Deterministic Structure into SLM Harnesses

Abstract

Enterprise SLM deployment faces epistemic asymmetry: small models cannot self-correct reasoning errors, while frontier LLMs incur prohibitive costs and data sovereignty risks at scale. We propose Semantic Gradient Descent (SGDe), a teacher-student framework that compiles agentic workflows into discrete execution plans--DAG topologies, system prompts, and deterministic code. The trailing e distinguishes this discrete, compilation-based approach from stochastic gradient descent. Operating in discrete semantic space, a frontier teacher generates natural-language critiques that serve as directional gradients to iteratively refine the SLM's workflow artefacts. We formalise SGDe under PAC learning, establishing sample-complexity bounds that enable convergence with as few as three training examples by leveraging the teacher as a statistical prior. On an adversarially synthesized GSM-Hard test set, compiled workflows achieve 91.3% accuracy at m=5 and 99.3% at m=3--a +26.3% to +34.3% absolute gain over state-of-the-art prompt optimisers. Within harness engineering, SGDe treats deterministic code placement (which subtasks to delegate to Python versus retain as LLM calls) as a trace-driven, per-node optimisation target, generalising static whole-problem offloading in PAL and PoT. The teacher compiles two deterministic structures: capability offloading (delegating subtasks to Python when the SLM is unreliable) and structural consensus (wrapping variance-sensitive steps in fan-out/fan-in subgraphs with deterministic voting).