The paper studies how to compress Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning traces for smaller models. It examines three compression dimensions—importance criterion, restructuring level, and compression budget—across Math and General domains and Long/Short CoT regimes. Findings show that step-level pruning works best for shared reasoning backbones, token-level pruning needs symbol-aware signals, domain-specific restructuring effects differ, and training-time compression may not reduce inference cost, especially for Long-CoT students.
arXiv:2608.29623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown strong performance on complex problems through long chain-of-thought (Long CoT) reasoning...
arXiv:2608.31066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves multi-step problem solving, but long reasoning traces inflate inference cost. Token-level CoT compression red...
arXiv:2606. 05988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models produce long chain-of-thought traces that are costly to distill and encourage verbose student outputs.
arXiv:2607. 11266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it often incurs substantial computational costs due to over-reasoning: the generation of redundant, verbose, or irrelevant steps.
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.
The paper investigates how different forms of compressed chain‑of‑thought (CoT) reasoning—Explicit, Composed, and Implicit—affect large language model (LLM) performance after supervised fine‑tuning (SFT). Using a synthetic compositional reasoning task, the authors show that coarser CoT requires more SFT data, that Composed and Implicit CoT benefit more from data scaling (with Composed also benefiting from repetition), and that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can decompose compressed steps learned during SFT. Additionally, unidirectional CoT ordering improves generalization on longer sequential tasks.
The paper introduces masked self‑distillation, a post‑training framework that trains a language model to internalize portions of its own intermediate reasoning traces. By varying the fraction of trace internalized, the authors demonstrate that models can achieve higher inference efficiency and improved task performance on math and graph‑coloring problems. Experiments on Qwen3‑4B and Qwen3‑8B show that the method generalizes well to in‑domain out‑of‑distribution cases without catastrophic forgetting, and that supervised fine‑tuning alone can reduce trace length at the expense of generalization.
arXiv:2602. 17686v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly improved LLMs' mathematical problem-solving capabilities, but distilling such capabilities into smaller models remains challenging due to the capacity mismatch between verbose teachers and compact students.
arXiv:2509.14093v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can substantially improve the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), but it often comes with hig...
OBC‑Prune introduces an outcome‑based calibration approach for pruning large reasoning models, focusing on the causal importance of each reasoning sentence rather than uniform activation salience. By pairing correct and incorrect rollouts and using intervention‑based analysis, it assigns per‑token weights that guide one‑shot pruning methods such as SparseGPT, Wanda, and ALPS. Experiments on DeepSeek‑R1‑Distill‑Qwen models show consistent accuracy gains and shorter reasoning traces across multiple benchmarks at 40‑50% sparsity.
arXiv:2603.00578v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long chain-of-thought~(CoT) reasoning improves the problem-solving capability of large reasoning models~(LRMs), but often incurs substantial...
arXiv:2608. 13721v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In reasoning supervised fine-tuning, candidate responses for the same instruction can differ substantially in how well they match the student's current distribution.