Distilling an 8B reasoning teacher into a 0.6B student recovers most summary quality at ~50× speed, but teacher type—not scale alone—determines which capabilities transfer.
Naturalthoughts: Selecting and distilling reasoning traces for general reasoning tasks
4 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
4
Pith papers citing it
abstract
Recent work has shown that distilling reasoning traces from a larger teacher model via supervised finetuning outperforms reinforcement learning with the smaller student model alone (Guo et al. 2025). However, there has not been a systematic study of what kind of reasoning demonstrations from the teacher are most effective in improving the student model's reasoning capabilities. In this work we curate high-quality "NaturalThoughts" by selecting reasoning traces from a strong teacher model based on a large pool of questions from NaturalReasoning (Yuan et al. 2025). We first conduct a systematic analysis of factors that affect distilling reasoning capabilities, in terms of sample efficiency and scalability for general reasoning tasks. We observe that simply scaling up data size with random sampling is a strong baseline with steady performance gains. Further, we find that selecting difficult examples that require more diverse reasoning strategies is more sample-efficient to transfer the teacher model's reasoning skills. Evaluated on both Llama and Qwen models, training with NaturalThoughts outperforms existing reasoning datasets such as OpenThoughts, LIMO, etc. on general STEM reasoning benchmarks including GPQA-Diamond, MMLU-Pro and SuperGPQA.
years
2026 4representative citing papers
STOP uses structured on-policy analysis to prune long reasoning traces to their earliest correct node, cutting token usage 19-42% with little accuracy loss on math benchmarks.
CoRD uses collaborative multi-teacher step-wise decoding with perplexity-guided beam search to generate higher-quality Long-CoT data that lets smaller models reach near-teacher performance with less supervision.
Recovering an orthogonal basis from model activations yields a model-native skill characterization that improves reasoning Pass@1 by up to 41% via targeted data selection and supports inference steering, outperforming human-characterized alternatives.
citing papers explorer
-
Different Teachers, Different Capabilities: Sub-1B On-Device Distillation for Structured Text Enrichment
Distilling an 8B reasoning teacher into a 0.6B student recovers most summary quality at ~50× speed, but teacher type—not scale alone—determines which capabilities transfer.
-
STOP: Structured On-Policy Pruning of Long-Form Reasoning in Low-Data Regimes
STOP uses structured on-policy analysis to prune long reasoning traces to their earliest correct node, cutting token usage 19-42% with little accuracy loss on math benchmarks.
-
Distilling Long-CoT Reasoning through Collaborative Step-wise Multi-Teacher Decoding
CoRD uses collaborative multi-teacher step-wise decoding with perplexity-guided beam search to generate higher-quality Long-CoT data that lets smaller models reach near-teacher performance with less supervision.
-
Characterizing Model-Native Skills
Recovering an orthogonal basis from model activations yields a model-native skill characterization that improves reasoning Pass@1 by up to 41% via targeted data selection and supports inference steering, outperforming human-characterized alternatives.