Teaching a 4B Model to Outplan Postgres
Rohan Bansal trained a 4B parameter model to generate Postgres join-order hints via distillation from a frontier model followed by reinforcement learning with a custom anchored GRPO variant — yielding a 1.81× geometric mean speedup on 113 join-heavy queries for about $1,200 in total compute. The methodology shows how cheap specialist RL is getting for niche performance optimization tasks.
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