arXiv:2505.18642cs.CL2025-05EMNLP被引 21

让小模型分段学大模型的推理思路,更快更准地做出判断。

Skip-Thinking: Chunk-wise Chain-of-Thought Distillation Enable Smaller Language Models to Reason Better and Faster

  • 将长推理过程拆成语义连贯的小段,每轮只学一段核心逻辑。
  • 小模型在多项任务中推理速度提升30%以上,准确率不降反而略升。
  • 适合资源有限但需快速推理的场景,如移动端或嵌入式设备。

链式思维(CoT)蒸馏使大语言模型指导小语言模型完成推理任务。现有方法在单次训练中让小模型学习完整的长推理过程,导致两个问题:1)长推理序列造成训练时的词元级批量过大,核心推理词元(直接影响后续推理正确性的词元)贡献占比过低,梯度被过度平滑,小模型收敛至尖锐极小值,无法掌握推理逻辑;2)响应速度慢,小模型必须生成完整推理链条后才能输出答案。为此,我们提出分块训练(CWT),通过启发式搜索将推理过程划分为语义连贯的内部小块,并在每轮训练中仅让小模型学习一个块。这样自然将非核心推理块(如总结、过渡部分)与核心推理块分离,显著提高核心推理词元在对应迭代中的占比。基于CWT,我们进一步提出跳步思考(STT),使小模型能自动跳过非核心中间块,直接到达答案,既提升推理速度又保持准确率。我们在多种小模型和多个推理任务上验证了该方法的有效性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation allows a large language model (LLM) to guide a small language model (SLM) in reasoning tasks. Existing methods train the SLM to learn the long rationale in one iteration, resulting in two issues: 1) Long rationales lead to a large token-level batch size during training, making gradients of core reasoning tokens (i.e., the token will directly affect the correctness of subsequent reasoning) over-smoothed as they contribute a tiny fraction of the rationale. As a result, the SLM converges to sharp minima where it fails to grasp the reasoning logic. 2) The response is slow, as the SLM must generate a long rationale before reaching the answer. Therefore, we propose chunk-wise training (CWT), which uses a heuristic search to divide the rationale into internal semantically coherent chunks and focuses SLM on learning from only one chunk per iteration. In this way, CWT naturally isolates non-reasoning chunks that do not involve the core reasoning token (e.g., summary and transitional chunks) from the SLM learning for reasoning chunks, making the fraction of the core reasoning token increase in the corresponding iteration. Based on CWT, skip-thinking training (STT) is proposed. STT makes the SLM automatically skip non-reasoning medium chunks to reach the answer, improving reasoning speed while maintaining accuracy. We validate our approach on a variety of SLMs and multiple reasoning tasks.

小模型推理链式思维加速推理

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