Current long chain-of-thought (long-CoT) models excel at mathematical reasoning but rely on slow and error-prone natural language traces. Tool-augmented agents address arithmetic via code execution, but often falter on complex logical tasks. We introduce a fine-tuning framework, DualDistill, that distills complementary reasoning strategies from multiple teachers into a unified student model. Using this approach, we train Agentic-R1, which dynamically selects the optimal strategy for each query, invoking tools for arithmetic and algorithmic problems, and using text-based reasoning for abstract ones. Our method improves accuracy across a range of tasks, including both computation-intensive and standard benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of multi-strategy distillation in achieving robust and efficient reasoning. Our project is available at https://github.com/StigLidu/DualDistill
@article{arxiv.2507.05707,
title = {Agentic-R1: Distilled Dual-Strategy Reasoning},
author = {Weihua Du and Pranjal Aggarwal and Sean Welleck and Yiming Yang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.05707},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted by EMNLP 2025. 15 pages. Project available at https://github.com/StigLidu/DualDistill