REVIEW 18 cited by
Distilling System 2 into System 1
Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.
SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event
T0 review · schema-true
One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.
pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp
Distilling System 2 into System 1
read the original abstract
Large language models (LLMs) can spend extra compute during inference to generate intermediate thoughts, which helps to produce better final responses. Since Chain-of-Thought (Wei et al., 2022), many such System 2 techniques have been proposed such as Rephrase and Respond (Deng et al., 2023a), System 2 Attention (Weston and Sukhbaatar, 2023) and Branch-Solve-Merge (Saha et al., 2023). In this work we investigate self-supervised methods to ``compile'' (distill) higher quality outputs from System 2 techniques back into LLM generations without intermediate reasoning token sequences, as this reasoning has been distilled into System 1. We show that several such techniques can be successfully distilled, resulting in improved results compared to the original System 1 performance, and with less inference cost than System 2. We posit that such System 2 distillation will be an important feature of future continually learning AI systems, enabling them to focus System 2 capabilities on the reasoning tasks that they cannot yet do well.
Forward citations
Cited by 18 Pith papers
-
Purified OPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation Without Losing How to Think
Purified OPSD subtracts a reference-only teacher's signal from standard OPSD supervision and applies PMI to create a cleaner distillation target, yielding gains on long-CoT models while preserving epistemic behavior.
-
Post Reasoning: Improving the Performance of Non-Thinking Models at No Cost
Post-Reasoning boosts LLM accuracy by reversing the usual answer-after-reasoning order, delivering mean relative gains of 17.37% across 117 model-benchmark pairs with zero extra cost.
-
Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space
Coconut lets LLMs perform reasoning directly in continuous latent space by recycling hidden states as inputs, outperforming standard chain-of-thought on search-intensive logical tasks with better accuracy-efficiency t...
-
CritiqueDriveVLM: From Verifier-Guided Reinforcement Learning to Latent Thought Distillation for Autonomous Driving
Verifier-guided multi-turn RL plus latent-state distillation raises DriveLMM-o1 MCQ to 76.54% for a tool-free teacher and yields a 28-token student at 416 ms (88% faster).
-
E-TTS: A New Embodied Test-Time Scaling Framework for Robotic Manipulation
E-TTS introduces a plug-and-play test-time scaling method for embodied tasks that unifies reasoning-action sampling with history buffers and closed-loop refinement to improve performance on manipulation benchmarks.
-
Dynamic Rollout Editing for Reducing Overthinking in RL-Trained Reasoning Models
Dynamic Rollout Editing reduces overthinking in RL-trained LLMs by editing post-answer continuations in successful rollouts and preferring the edited versions within GRPO groups.
-
ThoughtFold: Folding Reasoning Chains via Introspective Preference Learning
ThoughtFold applies introspective redundancy detection within correct CoT trajectories to create sub-trajectory spectra, then uses masked preference optimization to penalize redundant explorations, yielding 56% token ...
-
Skill-SD: Skill-Conditioned Self-Distillation for Multi-turn LLM Agents
Skill-SD turns an agent's completed trajectories into dynamic natural-language skills that condition only the teacher in self-distillation, yielding 14-42% gains over RL and OPSD baselines on multi-turn agent benchmarks.
-
Neural Chain-of-Thought Search: Searching the Optimal Reasoning Path to Enhance Large Language Models
NCoTS treats chain-of-thought reasoning as a search problem and uses a dual-factor heuristic to find paths that are over 3.5% more accurate and 22% shorter on benchmarks.
-
Physics of Language Models: Part 4.1, Architecture Design and the Magic of Canon Layers
Canon layers—residual 1-d causal convolutions over adjacent tokens—boost synthetic reasoning depth 2-4x, lift NoPE to RoPE level, and bring GLA up to Mamba2/GDN, with qualitative real-world confirmation.
-
Are Large Reasoning Models Interruptible?
Interrupting large reasoning models or changing the problem mid-thought sharply degrades accuracy, with up to 60% drops and distinct failure modes: reasoning leakage, panic, and self-doubt.
-
NoisyCoconut: Counterfactual Consensus via Latent Space Reasoning
Injecting noise into LLM latent trajectories creates diverse reasoning paths whose agreement acts as a confidence signal for selective abstention, cutting error rates from 40-70% to under 15% on math tasks.
-
Efficient Test-Time Scaling via Temporal Reasoning Aggregation
TRACE aggregates answer consistency and confidence trajectory over multiple reasoning steps to decide when to halt inference, reducing token usage by 25-30% while keeping accuracy within 1-2% of full reasoning.
-
Self-Aligned Reward: Towards Effective and Efficient Reasoners
Self-aligned reward uses relative perplexity differences to encourage concise, query-specific reasoning in LLMs, yielding 4% accuracy gains and 30% lower inference cost when added to PPO or GRPO.
-
Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models
A survey organizing techniques to achieve efficient reasoning in LLMs by shortening chain-of-thought outputs.
-
Knowledge Distillation Must Account for What It Loses
Knowledge distillation evaluations must report lost teacher capabilities via a Distillation Loss Statement rather than relying solely on task scores.
-
Knowledge Distillation Must Account for What It Loses
Knowledge distillation should be reframed as a lossy projection and evaluated with a taxonomy of off-metric losses plus a Distillation Loss Statement reporting preserved and lost capabilities.
-
From Long to Short: LLMs Excel at Trimming Own Reasoning Chains
EDIT searches across step-count prompts to find the shortest reasoning path the model consistently answers correctly.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.