Marco-o1 v2: Towards Widening The Distillation Bottleneck for Reasoning Models (2025.acl-long)
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Huifeng Yin, Yu Zhao, Minghao Wu, Xuanfan Ni, Bo Zeng, Huaiyu.wh Huaiyu.wh, Tianqi Shi, Liangying Shao, Chenyang Lyu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to distill large reasoning models into smaller lightweight models have shown competitive performances. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill long Chain-of-Thought data to improve SFT and RL methods by constructing data from scratch using Monte Carlo Tree Search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves reasoning performance on various benchmarks such as math (GSM8K, MATH, AIME). |
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Hyungjoo Chae, Dongjin Kang, Jihyuk Kim, Beong-woo Kwak, Sunghyun Park, Haeju Park, Jinyoung Yeo, Moontae Lee, Kyungjae Lee
| Challenge: | Existing large reasoning models are limited by their closed nature and high API costs and safety issues. |
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Distilling Reasoning Capabilities into Smaller Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a step-by-step reasoning approach like chain of thought has proved to be effective in eliciting reasoning abilities in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation approach that leverages CoT reasoning capabilities of larger models and distills them into smaller models. |
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PaD: Program-aided Distillation Can Teach Small Models Reasoning Better than Chain-of-thought Fine-tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel in various tasks, but their huge size and inaccessibility of parameters present challenges for practical deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose to use CoT data to distill task-specific ability from large language models to smaller models . they use reasoning programs to suppress errors in distilled data and improve distillation quality . |
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Improving Reasoning Capabilities in Small Models through Mixture-of-layers Distillation with Stepwise Attention on Key Information (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on transferring teacher-generated rationales to student models, but do not explore teachers’ dynamic attention towards critical information during reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that transfers the teacher’s stepwise attention on key information to the student model and a Mixture of Layers module that allows dynamic alignment between the teacher and student. |
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Capture the Key in Reasoning to Enhance CoT Distillation Generalization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing distillation methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on fine-tuning student SLMs on correct data, resulting in students struggling to learn the key instead of analyzing mistakes according to correct solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that exposes key reasoning steps rather than simple fine-tuning students' CoTs data by using a set of prompts with similar reasoning paths but divergent conclusions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves student SLMs' ability to learn key reasoning steps rather than fine-tuning them on teacher data. |
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. |
| Approach: | They examine the factors influencing CoT distillation including granularity, format and teacher model. |
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Distilling the Essence: Efficient Reasoning Distillation via Sequence Truncation (2026.findings-acl)
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Wei-Rui Chen, Vignesh Kothapalli, Ata Fatahibaarzi, Hejian Sang, Shao Tang, Qingquan Song, Zhipeng Wang, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
| Challenge: | a large reasoning model (LRM) training on large amounts of reasoning data is computationally expensive. |
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| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces training time, memory and FLOPs by 50% on long training sequences while retaining the full-sequence performance. |
When Internalization Fails: Finding Better Targets for Reasoning Compression (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning language models generate long reasoning traces that increase latency and cost. |
| Approach: | They compare three approaches to shorten reasoning traces by inference-time truncation . they use Implicit Chain-of-Thought-style curricula that progressively shorten the teacher trace . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods work well on GSM8K and multiplication tasks. |
CODI: Compressing Chain-of-Thought into Continuous Space via Self-Distillation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior implicit CoT methods have underperformed in terms of efficiency and robustness by relying on natural language tokens for reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that compresses natural language CoT into continuous space by aligning hidden states of a designated token. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the existing state-of-the-art in 3.1x compression rate and 28.2% accuracy on GSM8k scale. |
Pru-CoT: Towards Efficient Reasoning Distillation via Pruning Chain-of-Thought (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing heuristics fail to capture global causal logic due to rigid rules and limited search spaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts the essential logical structure from reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Pru-CoT models generate more compact reasoning paths compared to models trained on verbose data. |