# Large Language Models Are Reasoning Teachers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10071 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10071/

## Key facts

- Cited by 329 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 50 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2022.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/prompting-and-chain-of-thought-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14858/) (2022)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [STaR: Bootstrapping Reasoning With Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14465/) (2022)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [Show Your Work: Scratchpads for Intermediate Computation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00114/) (2021)
- [Are NLP Models really able to Solve Simple Math Word Problems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07191/) (2021)
- [Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07947/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 329)

- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [On-Policy Distillation of Language Models: Learning from Self-Generated Mistakes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13649/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00923/) (2023)
- [Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02301/) (2023)
- [MetaMath: Bootstrap Your Own Mathematical Questions for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12284/) (2023)
- [ChemCrow: Augmenting large-language models with chemistry tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05376/) (2023)
- [Prometheus: Inducing Fine-grained Evaluation Capability in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08491/) (2023)
- [Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21187/) (2024)
- [Is ChatGPT a General-Purpose Natural Language Processing Task Solver?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06476/) (2023)
- [Augmented Language Models: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07842/) (2023)
- [ReConcile: Round-Table Conference Improves Reasoning via Consensus among Diverse LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13007/) (2023)
- [Quiet-STaR: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Think Before Speaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09629/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13116/) (2024)
- [ToRA: A Tool-Integrated Reasoning Agent for Mathematical Problem Solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17452/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Model Compression for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07633/) (2023)
- [Specializing Smaller Language Models towards Multi-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12726/) (2023)
- [Token-Budget-Aware LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18547/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model Alignment: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15025/) (2023)
- [CODI: Compressing Chain-of-Thought into Continuous Space via Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21074/) (2025)
- [Query Rewriting for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14283/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Efficient Inference for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14294/) (2024)
- [Navigate through Enigmatic Labyrinth A Survey of Chain of Thought Reasoning: Advances, Frontiers and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15402/) (2023)
- [Symbolic Chain-of-Thought Distillation: Small Models Can Also "Think" Step-by-Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14050/) (2023)
- [DDCoT: Duty-Distinct Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Multimodal Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16436/) (2023)
- [Prometheus-Vision: Vision-Language Model as a Judge for Fine-Grained Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06591/) (2024)
- [On Memorization of Large Language Models in Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23123/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Can Learn Temporal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06853/) (2024)
- [The CoT Collection: Improving Zero-shot and Few-shot Learning of Language Models via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14045/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Meet NLP: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12819/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent works have shown that chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting can elicit language models to solve complex reasoning tasks, step-by-step. However, prompt-based CoT methods are dependent on very large models such as GPT-3 175B which are prohibitive to deploy at scale. In this paper, we use these large models as reasoning teachers to enable complex reasoning in smaller models and reduce model size requirements by several orders of magnitude. We propose Fine-tune-CoT, a method that generates reasoning samples from very large teacher models to fine-tune smaller models. We evaluate our method on a wide range of public models and complex tasks. We find that Fine-tune-CoT enables substantial reasoning capability in small models, far outperforming prompt-based baselines and even the teacher model in many tasks. Additionally, we extend our method by leveraging the teacher model's ability to generate multiple distinct rationales for each original sample. Enriching the fine-tuning data with such diverse reasoning results in a substantial performance boost across datasets, even for very small models. We conduct ablations and sample studies to understand the emergence of reasoning capabilities of student models. Our code implementation and data are available at https://github.com/itsnamgyu/reasoning-teacher.