The paper investigates whether distilling reasoning traces from large teacher models is worth the extra compute compared to standard instruction fine‑tuning (IFT). By generating paired IFT and reasoning outputs from the same teacher and training student models at five scales, the authors find that, at matched FLOPs, IFT generally lies on or near the Pareto frontier across most configurations. Reasoning traces only reach the frontier on open‑ended tasks for models 7B and larger, and a curriculum mixing 25–50% reasoning data with IFT can capture most of the accuracy benefit at a lower compute cost.
arXiv:2508. 09883v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities in tasks such as algorithmic coding and mathematical problem-solving.
arXiv:2607. 22629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) produce long, explicit chains of intermediate steps before generating a final answer at inference time.
arXiv:2512. 21002v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distilling the capabilities from a large reasoning model (LRM) to a smaller student model often involves training on substantial amounts of reasoning data.
arXiv:2606. 21994v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) improves reasoning models by applying dense teacher supervision on student-sampled trajectories.
SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents proposes a new framework that adaptively reweights distillation strength at each reasoning step based on step-level divergence. This approach mitigates cascading errors in tool-integrated reasoning by attenuating misleading teacher signals in high-divergence regions while preserving dense guidance where student and teacher align. Experiments on math, science, and code benchmarks show up to 20.86% improvement over the second-best baseline, with a 0.6B student scoring 26.13% on AIME 2025.
arXiv:2607.22629v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Reasoning Models produce long, explicit chains of intermediate steps before generating a final answer at inference time. These intermediate t...
arXiv:2609.37044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Explicit intermediate reasoning gives large language models (LLMs) a stronger problem-solving mode. We study learning from this think-mode advantage vi...
arXiv:2605. 15532v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: 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.
arXiv:2606. 01080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models often improve on difficult tasks by spending inference-time compute on a reasoning trace before producing the final answer.
arXiv:2609.26708v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantization-aware distillation (QAD) restores much of the short-form question-answering performance lost to sub-3-bit quantization, yet leaves mathema...
The paper investigates on‑policy self‑distillation (OPSD) as a method to enhance reasoning in language models, focusing on mathematical reasoning across models from 0.6B to 8B parameters. Through controlled experiments and token‑level analysis, the authors find that OPSD’s effectiveness depends on alignment between the teacher’s reasoning mode and the full teacher prefix, rather than on privileged semantics alone. They observe that OPSD only improves reasoning in limited compatibility regimes, while often causing length growth, degradation, or behavioral collapse, and that the teacher’s signal is unstable and not predictive of downstream performance.
arXiv:2607. 05184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation is a promising recipe for self-improvement in language models.