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
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
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.
By Durgesh Kalwar, Vardhan Palod, Jaya Adithya Pavuluri, Subbarao Kambhampati
arXiv:2607. 02234v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving LLM reasoning, where a privileged teacher with access to reference solutions provides token-level supervision on the student's own generated trajectories.
By Zhanming Shen, Jintao Tong, Shaotian Yan, Chen Shen, Hao Chen, Wentao Ye, Xiaomeng Hu, Rui Miao, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao, Gang Chen, Jieping Ye
CoTranslator is a method that converts reverse chain-of-thought (CoT) responses into verified forward CoT responses, enabling efficient large-scale generation and verification of training data for reasoning distillation. Trained on a small set of paired reverse and rejection-sampled forward responses, it improves student model accuracy on mathematics benchmarks by up to 5.82 percentage points and retains 95.0% of rejection sampling’s accuracy while using only 35.9% of its compute. The translator also transfers to new datasets, teachers, and STEM problems, boosting average STEM accuracy for 4B and 8B students by 4.88 and 4.31 percentage points, respectively.
By Zinan Tang, Zhuoshi Pan, Kairui Chen, Ze Yan, Shaomian Zheng, Yukun Zhang, Gang Wang, Biqing Huang
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.
By Cuong Dang, Hoang Anh Just, Ruoxi Jia
arXiv:2606. 31048v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates knowledge distillation from a large reasoning model (DeepSeek-R1) to a compact student model (Qwen2.
By Gaurab Baral, Aaditya Khanal, Yangyang Tao, Junxiu Zhou
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.
By Siyang Lyu, Xinghao Chen, Zhijing Sun, Tong Liu, Dawei Zhu, Xiaoyu Shen
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...
By Jie Cao, Tianwei Lin, Juekai Lin, Zhenxuan Fan, Yunqi Cao, Bo Yuan, Ziyuan Zhao, Rolan Yan, Wenqiao Zhang, Siliang Tang
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: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.
By Durgesh Kalwar, Vardhan Palod, Subbarao Kambhampati
arXiv:2602. 22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students.
By Zhaoyang Zhang, Shuli Jiang, Yantao Shen, Yuting Zhang, Dhananjay Ram, Shuo Yang, Zhuowen Tu, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto