Distilling Long-CoT Reasoning through Collaborative Step-wise Multi-Teacher Decoding

Taewon Yun, Jisu Shin, Jeonghwan Choi, Seunghwan Bang, Hwanjun Song

Distilling Long-CoT Reasoning through Collaborative Step-wise Multi-Teacher Decoding: 42 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #8 of 43 papers on 2026-05-18. Day-by-day upvote history.

Distilling large reasoning models is essential for making Long-CoT reasoning practical, as full-scale inference remains computationally prohibitive. Existing curation-based approaches select complete reasoning traces post-hoc, overlooking collaboration among heterogeneous teachers and lacking dynamic exploration, which leads to redundant sampling and missed complementary reasoning. We introduce CoRD, a collaborative multi-teacher decoding framework that performs step-wise reasoning synthesis guided by predictive perplexity-based scoring and beam search. This enables heterogeneous LRMs to jointly construct coherent reasoning trajectories while efficiently preserving diverse, high-potential hypotheses. Experiments show that CoRD produces higher-quality reasoning data and achieves near teacher-level student performance with fewer, structured supervision signals, without substantial efficiency overhead. CoRD further generalizes well to out-of-domain and open-ended settings. The dataset and model are available at https://github.com/DISL-Lab/CoRD{https://github.com/DISL-Lab/CoRD}.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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