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Large language models (LLMs) excel in complex reasoning tasks, and distilling their reasoning capabilities into smaller models has shown promise. However, we uncover an interesting phenomenon, which we term the Small Model Learnability Gap:…
Reasoning-centric large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance by generating intermediate reasoning trajectories, but often incur excessive token usage and high inference-time decoding cost. We observe that, when solving the same…
The significant computational demands of large language models have increased interest in distilling reasoning abilities into smaller models via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) distillation. Current CoT distillation methods mainly focus on…
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in recent natural language processing (NLP) tasks, their deployment poses substantial challenges due to high computational and memory demands in real-world…
Distillation enables compact Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to obtain strong reasoning capabilities, yet the prompts driving this process are typically chosen via simple heuristics or aggregated from off-the-shelf datasets. We reveal a…
On-policy self-distillation has become a strong recipe for LLM reasoning, where a privileged teacher supervises the student's own rollouts while conditioning on the reference solution. A design choice shared by nearly all such methods,…
Distilling reasoning traces from strong large language models into smaller ones is a promising route to improve intelligence in resource-constrained settings. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: offline distillation from…
Large language models (LLMs) excel at reasoning tasks requiring long thought sequences for planning, reflection, and refinement. However, their substantial model size and high computational demands are impractical for widespread deployment.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have displayed remarkable performances across various complex tasks by leveraging Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. Recently, studies have proposed a Knowledge Distillation (KD) approach, reasoning distillation,…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale up and gain powerful Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs) reasoning abilities, practical resource constraints drive efforts to distill these capabilities into more compact Smaller Language Models (SLMs). We find…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become a central engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains the dominant…
We study {on-policy self-distillation} (OPSD), where a language model improves its reasoning ability by distilling privileged teacher distributions along its own on-policy trajectories. Despite the performance gains of OPSD, we identify a…
Self-distillation has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for LLMs, often improving performance while shortening reasoning traces. However, in mathematical reasoning, we find that it can reduce response length while degrading…
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…
Large reasoning models exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities via long, elaborate reasoning trajectories. Supervised fine-tuning on such reasoning traces, also known as distillation, can be a cost-effective way to boost reasoning…
Knowledge distillation improves large language model (LLM) reasoning by compressing the knowledge of a teacher LLM to train smaller LLMs. On-policy distillation advances this approach by having the student sample its own trajectories while…
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is an emerging LLM post-training paradigm in which the model serves as its own teacher: conditioned on privileged information such as a reference trace or hint, the same policy provides dense token-level…
Large Reasoning Models(LRMs) such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities by scaling test-time compute and generating long Chain-of-Thought(CoT). Distillation--post-training on LRMs-generated data--is a…
Reasoning distillation transfers complex reasoning abilities from large language models (LLMs) to smaller ones, yet its success depends on how well the training data align with the student model. This paper introduces the Data-Model…
Reasoning distillation aims to transfer multi-step reasoning capabilities from large language models to smaller, more efficient ones. While recent methods have shown promising gains, they typically rely on static teacher-student hierarchies…