Trace-of-Thought Prompting: Investigating Prompt-Based Knowledge Distillation Through Question Decomposition (2024.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Trace-of-Thought Prompting allows small neural networks to emulate larger, teacher models with reduced computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to distill critical reasoning capabilities from teacher models to student models . they use problem decomposition to enhance interpretability and facilitate human-in-the-loop interventions . |
| Outcome: | a new framework enables small neural networks to emulate the performance of larger, teacher models . it leverages problem decomposition to enhance interpretability and facilitate human-in-the-loop interventions . the proposed framework is available on github.com/trace-of-thought/trac-of_thought-prompting/main . |
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| Challenge: | Advanced reasoning typically requires Chain-of-Thought prompting, which is accurate but incurs prohibitive latency and substantial test-time inference costs. |
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| Challenge: | Chain of thought prompting improves reasoning capabilities of large language models but only emerges in models with tens of billions of parameters. |
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Unveiling the Key Factors for Distilling Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinghao Chen, Zhijing Sun, Guo Wenjin, Miaoran Zhang, Yanjun Chen, Yirong Sun, Hui Su, Yijie Pan, Dietrich Klakow, Wenjie Li, Xiaoyu Shen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning tasks through Chain-of-Thought prompting. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have raised concerns about inference costs, increasing the need for research into model compression. |
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| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) enables the compression of large language models (LLMs) conventional methods suffer from training-inference mismatches and suboptimal performance due to expensive student-generated outputs. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance across various domains but struggle with arithmetic reasoning tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Symbolic Chain-of-thought Distillation (SCoTD) is a method to train a smaller student model on rationalizations sampled from a significantly larger teacher model. |
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Mentor-KD: Making Small Language Models Better Multi-step Reasoners (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive emergent capabilities by leveraging Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Distillation approach which transfers multi-step reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to smaller LMs by fine-tuning language models of multi- step rationales generated by LLM teachers. |
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Large Language Models Are Reasoning Teachers (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting can elicit language models to solve complex reasoning tasks step-by-step. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses large model samples as reasoning teachers to fine-tune smaller models. |
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DRP: Distilled Reasoning Pruning with Mathematical Skill-aware Step Decomposition for Efficient Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions to this problem are inference-time pruning and tuning-based distillation. |
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