CoTranslator: Reverse to Forward Chain-of-Thought Translator for Reasoning Distillation

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.

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• efficiency
• benchmarks