Trace-of-Thought Prompting: Investigating Prompt-Based Knowledge Distillation Through Question Decomposition

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Hauptverfasser: McDonald, Tyler, Emami, Ali
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author McDonald, Tyler
Emami, Ali
author_facet McDonald, Tyler
Emami, Ali
contents Knowledge distillation allows smaller neural networks to emulate the performance of larger, teacher models with reduced computational demands. Traditional methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) often necessitate extensive fine-tuning, which limits their accessibility. To address this, we introduce Trace-of-Thought Prompting, a novel framework designed to distill critical reasoning capabilities from high-resource teacher models (over 8 billion parameters) to low-resource student models (up to 8 billion parameters). This approach leverages problem decomposition to enhance interpretability and facilitate human-in-the-loop interventions. Empirical evaluations on the GSM8K and MATH datasets show that student models achieve accuracy gains of up to 113% on GSM8K and 21% on MATH, with significant improvements particularly notable in smaller models like Llama 2 and Zephyr. Our results suggest a promising pathway for open-source, low-resource models to eventually serve both as both students and teachers, potentially reducing our reliance on high-resource, proprietary models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_20946
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Trace-of-Thought Prompting: Investigating Prompt-Based Knowledge Distillation Through Question Decomposition
McDonald, Tyler
Emami, Ali
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Knowledge distillation allows smaller neural networks to emulate the performance of larger, teacher models with reduced computational demands. Traditional methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) often necessitate extensive fine-tuning, which limits their accessibility. To address this, we introduce Trace-of-Thought Prompting, a novel framework designed to distill critical reasoning capabilities from high-resource teacher models (over 8 billion parameters) to low-resource student models (up to 8 billion parameters). This approach leverages problem decomposition to enhance interpretability and facilitate human-in-the-loop interventions. Empirical evaluations on the GSM8K and MATH datasets show that student models achieve accuracy gains of up to 113% on GSM8K and 21% on MATH, with significant improvements particularly notable in smaller models like Llama 2 and Zephyr. Our results suggest a promising pathway for open-source, low-resource models to eventually serve both as both students and teachers, potentially reducing our reliance on high-resource, proprietary models.
title Trace-of-Thought Prompting: Investigating Prompt-Based Knowledge Distillation Through Question Decomposition
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20946