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Auteurs principaux: Muhebwa, Aggrey, Osman, Khalid K.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19511
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author Muhebwa, Aggrey
Osman, Khalid K.
author_facet Muhebwa, Aggrey
Osman, Khalid K.
contents Large proprietary language models exhibit strong causal reasoning abilities that smaller open-source models struggle to replicate. We introduce a novel framework for distilling causal explanations that transfers causal reasoning skills from a powerful teacher model to a compact open-source model. The key idea is to train the smaller model to develop causal reasoning abilities by generating structured cause-and-effect explanations consistent with those of the teacher model. To evaluate the quality of the student-generated explanations, we introduce a new metric called Causal Explanation Coherence (CEC) to assess the structural and logical consistency of causal reasoning. This metric uses sentence-level semantic alignment to measure how well each part of the generated explanation corresponds to the teacher's reference, capturing both faithfulness and coverage of the underlying causal chain. Our framework and the CEC metric provide a principled foundation for training smaller models to perform robust causal reasoning and for systematically assessing the coherence of explanations in language model outputs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_19511
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal Distillation: Transferring Structured Explanations from Large to Compact Language Models
Muhebwa, Aggrey
Osman, Khalid K.
Computation and Language
Large proprietary language models exhibit strong causal reasoning abilities that smaller open-source models struggle to replicate. We introduce a novel framework for distilling causal explanations that transfers causal reasoning skills from a powerful teacher model to a compact open-source model. The key idea is to train the smaller model to develop causal reasoning abilities by generating structured cause-and-effect explanations consistent with those of the teacher model. To evaluate the quality of the student-generated explanations, we introduce a new metric called Causal Explanation Coherence (CEC) to assess the structural and logical consistency of causal reasoning. This metric uses sentence-level semantic alignment to measure how well each part of the generated explanation corresponds to the teacher's reference, capturing both faithfulness and coverage of the underlying causal chain. Our framework and the CEC metric provide a principled foundation for training smaller models to perform robust causal reasoning and for systematically assessing the coherence of explanations in language model outputs.
title Causal Distillation: Transferring Structured Explanations from Large to Compact Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19511