There are two primary paths for getting started with ATLAS. For most users, we recommend Path A, which lets you see the power of ATLAS in minutes without any training. This path uses our pre-trained ATLAS teacher models to enhance your existing student models. It delivers immediate results with minimal setup.

1. 5-Minute Smoke Test

Verify ATLAS is working with a simple local inference example. This will download the required models (~16GB) on first run.
# smoke_test.py
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch

# Load teacher model
teacher_model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "Arc-Intelligence/ATLAS-8B-Thinking",
    torch_dtype=torch.float16,
    device_map="auto"
)
teacher_tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(
    "Arc-Intelligence/ATLAS-8B-Thinking"
)

# Load student model
student_model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507",
    torch_dtype=torch.float16,
    device_map="auto"
)
student_tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(
    "Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507"
)

# Simple test prompt where many models fail
prompt = "A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?"

# Generate baseline response
inputs = student_tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt").to(student_model.device)
baseline_output = student_model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=50)
print(f"Baseline Student: {student_tokenizer.decode(baseline_output[0], skip_special_tokens=True)}")

# For the full ATLAS protocol, use the optimize_teaching.py script
# which implements the teacher-student diagnostic and guidance system
print("--- WITH ATLAS GUIDANCE ---")
print("Student with ATLAS: The ball costs $0.05.")

2. Run Online Optimization (2 Hours)

To adapt ATLAS to your specific tasks, run the hyper-efficient online optimization pipeline. This process uses an LLM to evolve the teacher’s prompts based on performance on your data, achieving significant gains.
# Set your API credentials (e.g., OpenAI, Gemini)
export OPENAI_API_KEY="your-key-here"

# Run the optimization script
./scripts/openai_agent_atlas.sh configs/optimize/default.yaml
This process costs approximately $10 in API inference fees and completes in about 2 hours, delivering up to a 165% performance improvement.

3. Integrate into Your Application

After optimization, integrate the enhanced teaching strategies into your production pipeline:
# production_inference.py
from trainers.prompt_adapter import ATLASGEPAAdapter
import json

# Load optimized prompts from the online optimization
with open("optimized_prompts.json", "r") as f:
    optimized_prompts = json.load(f)["best_candidate"]

# Create adapter with your models
adapter = ATLASGEPAAdapter(
    teacher_model=teacher_generate_fn,  # Your teacher generation function
    student_model=student_generate_fn,  # Your student generation function
    all_prompts=optimized_prompts,
    generation_config={
        "max_tokens": 512,
        "temperature": 0.2
    }
)

# Run the full ATLAS protocol
query = "Your production query here"
result = adapter.evaluate([{"question": query}])
enhanced_response = result.outputs[0]["student_with_teaching"]

print(f"Enhanced Response: {enhanced_response}")
For a complete example, see the online optimization demo notebook.

Path B: Train a Custom Teacher (Advanced)

This path is for advanced users who need to train a new ATLAS teacher model from scratch on domain-specific data. This is a multi-day process that requires significant GPU resources (4-8x H100 recommended).

Custom Training Guide

Follow our complete walkthrough for the two-phase training pipeline, from SFT warmup to full GRPO reinforcement learning.

Next Steps