Effectiveness of Chain-of-Thought in Distilling Reasoning Capability from Large Language Models

Abstract

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is a widely used method to improve the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). More recently, CoT has been leveraged in Knowledge Distillation (KD) to transfer reasoning capability from a larger LLM to a smaller one. This paper examines the role of CoT in distilling the reasoning capability from larger LLMs to smaller LLMs using white-box KD, analysing its effectiveness in improving the performance of the distilled models for various natural language reasoning and understanding tasks. We conduct white-box KD experiments using LLMs from the Qwen and Llama2 families, employing CoT data from the CoT-Collection dataset. The distilled models are then evaluated on natural language reasoning and understanding tasks from the BIG-Bench-Hard (BBH) benchmark, which presents complex challenges for smaller LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate the role of CoT in improving white-box KD effectiveness, enabling the distilled models to achieve better average performance in natural language reasoning and understanding tasks from BBH.

In proceedings of the 18th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2025)