Keypoint-based Progressive Chain-of-Thought Distillation for LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Feng, Kaituo, Li, Changsheng, Zhang, Xiaolu, Zhou, Jun, Yuan, Ye, Wang, Guoren
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910459160952832
author Feng, Kaituo
Li, Changsheng
Zhang, Xiaolu
Zhou, Jun
Yuan, Ye
Wang, Guoren
author_facet Feng, Kaituo
Li, Changsheng
Zhang, Xiaolu
Zhou, Jun
Yuan, Ye
Wang, Guoren
contents Chain-of-thought distillation is a powerful technique for transferring reasoning abilities from large language models (LLMs) to smaller student models. Previous methods typically require the student to mimic the step-by-step rationale produced by LLMs, often facing the following challenges: (i) Tokens within a rationale vary in significance, and treating them equally may fail to accurately mimic keypoint tokens, leading to reasoning errors. (ii) They usually distill knowledge by consistently predicting all the steps in a rationale, which falls short in distinguishing the learning order of step generation. This diverges from the human cognitive progression of starting with easy tasks and advancing to harder ones, resulting in sub-optimal outcomes. To this end, we propose a unified framework, called KPOD, to address these issues. Specifically, we propose a token weighting module utilizing mask learning to encourage accurate mimicry of keypoint tokens by the student during distillation. Besides, we develop an in-rationale progressive distillation strategy, starting with training the student to generate the final reasoning steps and gradually extending to cover the entire rationale. To accomplish this, a weighted token generation loss is proposed to assess step reasoning difficulty, and a value function is devised to schedule the progressive distillation by considering both step difficulty and question diversity. Extensive experiments on four reasoning benchmarks illustrate our KPOD outperforms previous methods by a large margin.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_16064
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Keypoint-based Progressive Chain-of-Thought Distillation for LLMs
Feng, Kaituo
Li, Changsheng
Zhang, Xiaolu
Zhou, Jun
Yuan, Ye
Wang, Guoren
Computation and Language
Chain-of-thought distillation is a powerful technique for transferring reasoning abilities from large language models (LLMs) to smaller student models. Previous methods typically require the student to mimic the step-by-step rationale produced by LLMs, often facing the following challenges: (i) Tokens within a rationale vary in significance, and treating them equally may fail to accurately mimic keypoint tokens, leading to reasoning errors. (ii) They usually distill knowledge by consistently predicting all the steps in a rationale, which falls short in distinguishing the learning order of step generation. This diverges from the human cognitive progression of starting with easy tasks and advancing to harder ones, resulting in sub-optimal outcomes. To this end, we propose a unified framework, called KPOD, to address these issues. Specifically, we propose a token weighting module utilizing mask learning to encourage accurate mimicry of keypoint tokens by the student during distillation. Besides, we develop an in-rationale progressive distillation strategy, starting with training the student to generate the final reasoning steps and gradually extending to cover the entire rationale. To accomplish this, a weighted token generation loss is proposed to assess step reasoning difficulty, and a value function is devised to schedule the progressive distillation by considering both step difficulty and question diversity. Extensive experiments on four reasoning benchmarks illustrate our KPOD outperforms previous methods by a large margin.
title Keypoint-based Progressive Chain-of-Thought Distillation for LLMs
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16064