arXiv AI By Min-Seon Kim, Seungdong Yoa, Sanghyu Yoon, Ye Seul Sim, Suhee Yoon, Dongmin Kim, Jung-Eun Kim

Agents, Think Only When it Helps

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The paper investigates the role of thought supervision in distilling large language model agents. By independently perturbing teacher thoughts and actions during distillation, the authors find that removing or altering thoughts has little impact on student performance across various benchmarks and model scales. However, thought supervision becomes important when the action does not reveal the information contained in the thought, suggesting that including thoughts in the training data may be unnecessary for many cases.

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