Beyond Imitation: Learning Key Reasoning Steps from Dual Chain-of-Thoughts in Reasoning Distillation

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Hauptverfasser: Dai, Chengwei, Li, Kun, Zhou, Wei, Hu, Songlin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Dai, Chengwei
Li, Kun
Zhou, Wei
Hu, Songlin
author_facet Dai, Chengwei
Li, Kun
Zhou, Wei
Hu, Songlin
contents As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale up and gain powerful Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs) reasoning abilities, practical resource constraints drive efforts to distill these capabilities into more compact Smaller Language Models (SLMs). We find that CoTs consist mainly of simple reasoning forms, with a small proportion ($\approx 4.7\%$) of key reasoning steps that truly impact conclusions. However, previous distillation methods typically involve supervised fine-tuning student SLMs only on correct CoTs data produced by teacher LLMs, resulting in students struggling to learn the key reasoning steps, instead imitating the teacher's reasoning forms and making errors or omissions on these steps. To address these issues, drawing an analogy to human learning, where analyzing mistakes according to correct solutions often reveals the crucial steps leading to successes or failures, we propose mistak\textbf{E}-\textbf{D}riven key reason\textbf{I}ng step distilla\textbf{T}ion (\textbf{EDIT}), a novel method that further aids SLMs learning key reasoning steps rather than mere simple fine-tuning. Firstly, to expose these crucial steps in CoTs, we design specific prompts to generate dual CoTs data with similar reasoning paths but divergent conclusions. Then, we apply the minimum edit distance algorithm on the dual CoTs data to locate these key steps and optimize the likelihood of these steps. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of EDIT across both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmark reasoning datasets. Further analysis shows that EDIT can generate high-quality CoTs with more correct key reasoning steps. Notably, we also explore how different mistake patterns affect performance and find that EDIT benefits more from logical errors than from knowledge or mathematical calculation errors in dual CoTs\footnote{Code can be found at \url{https://github.com/C-W-D/EDIT}}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_19737
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Imitation: Learning Key Reasoning Steps from Dual Chain-of-Thoughts in Reasoning Distillation
Dai, Chengwei
Li, Kun
Zhou, Wei
Hu, Songlin
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale up and gain powerful Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs) reasoning abilities, practical resource constraints drive efforts to distill these capabilities into more compact Smaller Language Models (SLMs). We find that CoTs consist mainly of simple reasoning forms, with a small proportion ($\approx 4.7\%$) of key reasoning steps that truly impact conclusions. However, previous distillation methods typically involve supervised fine-tuning student SLMs only on correct CoTs data produced by teacher LLMs, resulting in students struggling to learn the key reasoning steps, instead imitating the teacher's reasoning forms and making errors or omissions on these steps. To address these issues, drawing an analogy to human learning, where analyzing mistakes according to correct solutions often reveals the crucial steps leading to successes or failures, we propose mistak\textbf{E}-\textbf{D}riven key reason\textbf{I}ng step distilla\textbf{T}ion (\textbf{EDIT}), a novel method that further aids SLMs learning key reasoning steps rather than mere simple fine-tuning. Firstly, to expose these crucial steps in CoTs, we design specific prompts to generate dual CoTs data with similar reasoning paths but divergent conclusions. Then, we apply the minimum edit distance algorithm on the dual CoTs data to locate these key steps and optimize the likelihood of these steps. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of EDIT across both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmark reasoning datasets. Further analysis shows that EDIT can generate high-quality CoTs with more correct key reasoning steps. Notably, we also explore how different mistake patterns affect performance and find that EDIT benefits more from logical errors than from knowledge or mathematical calculation errors in dual CoTs\footnote{Code can be found at \url{https://github.com/C-W-D/EDIT}}.
title Beyond Imitation: Learning Key Reasoning Steps from Dual Chain-of-Thoughts in Reasoning Distillation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19737