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.
By Xiaojun Wu, Xiaoguang Jiang, Huiyang Li, Jucai Zhai, Dengfeng Liu, Qiaobo Hao, Huang Liu, Zhiguo Yang, Ji Xie, Ninglun Gu, Jin Yang, Kailai Zhang, Yelun Bao, Jun Wang
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...
By Yangsong Lan, Renkai Hu, HongKai Zheng, Bo Zhang, Renzhi Wang, Hongliang Dai, Piji Li
BoundaryEvo introduces a two‑stage data‑model co‑evolution framework for distilling long‑chain reasoning from large teacher models into small language models. First, Capability Priming distills a small set of teacher trajectories to give the student an initial reasoning baseline. Then, Capability‑Boundary Co‑Evolution iteratively selects questions the student has not mastered but the teacher can solve, updating the training data as the student’s capability grows. With only 1,000 examples, BoundaryEvo improves Qwen3.5‑4B accuracy from 62.9 % to 75.3 % on IMO‑AnswerBench and from 26.8 % to 46.0 % on AMO‑Bench, outperforming static and dynamic baselines across 11 benchmarks.
By Jiaming Su, Suorong Yang, Xudong Li, Tengchao Yang, Peng Ye
The paper introduces Cognition-Aligned Reasoning Distillation (CARD), an RL-based method that converts solver trajectories from large reasoning models into teaching trajectories better suited for smaller student models. CARD uses two reward signals—a Distribution Alignment Reward and a Logical Coherence Reward—to align the teacher’s outputs with the student’s cognitive capabilities and reduce misleading reasoning steps. Experiments show that CARD improves both in-domain and out-of-distribution performance compared to distillation from raw teacher trajectories.
By Yashuo Luo, Qianren Mao, Ziqi Qin, Junnan Liu, Haitao Li, Qili Zhang, Yuan Gao, Zhijun Chen, Xu Wang
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.
By Wei-Rui Chen, Vignesh Kothapalli, Ata Fatahibaarzi, Hejian Sang, Shao Tang, Qingquan Song, Zhipeng Wang, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
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.
By Bowen Yu, Sheng Zhang, Binhao Wang, Yi Wen, Jingtong Gao, Bowen Liu, Zimo Zhao, Shanshan Ye, Wanyu Wang, Maolin Wang, Xiangyu Zhao
The paper introduces Validity-Calibrated Reasoning Distillation, a new framework for transferring multi-step reasoning from large language models to smaller ones. Unlike prior methods that rely on static teacher‑student hierarchies and trajectory imitation, this approach treats distillation as a local learning‑signal allocation problem. By comparing the teacher’s and student’s next‑step actions under the same prefix and modulating updates based on their relative local validity, the method provides dynamic, context‑dependent supervision that preserves structural guidance while adapting to local reasoning quality. Experiments on math, code, and instruction‑following benchmarks show that this strategy outperforms strong distillation baselines.
By Khouloud Saadi, Di Wang
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.
By Nicolas Boizard, Hippolyte Gisserot-Boukhlef, Kevin El Haddad, C\'eline Hudelot, Pierre Colombo
arXiv:2606. 21994v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) improves reasoning models by applying dense teacher supervision on student-sampled trajectories.
By Qingfei Zhao, Huan Song, Shuyu Tian, Jiawei Shao, Xuelong Li
arXiv:2610.09587v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reasoning capabilities are critical for advancing Large Language Models, yet current approaches either require massive computational budgets or struggl...
By Taehoon Kim, Seunggeun Cho, Dongsu Han
arXiv:2610.02703v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) improves large language model reasoning by training students on their own rollouts with dense token-wise supervision from...
By Yuxiang Zhang, Ding Cao, Shuting Cui, Lei Wang, Weijieying Ren, Tianxiang Zhao
arXiv:2605.10194v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) uses a model as its own teacher under privileged context, providing token-level supervision on the model's own r...
By Jiaxuan Wang, Xuan Ouyang, Zhiyu Chen, Yulan Hu, Lan-Zhe Guo