# TwT: Thinking without Tokens by Habitual Reasoning Distillation with Multi-Teachers' Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.24198 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24198/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 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 16 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/prompting-and-chain-of-thought-reasoning/)
- Knowledge distillation / [Knowledge distillation for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/distill/knowledge-distillation-for-llms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [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)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Inference Scaling Laws: An Empirical Analysis of Compute-Optimal Inference for Problem-Solving with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00724/) (2024)
- [Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07178/) (2021)
- [From Explicit CoT to Implicit CoT: Learning to Internalize CoT Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14838/) (2024)
- [Distilling Task-Specific Knowledge from BERT into Simple Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12136/) (2019)
- [Reasoning in Token Economies: Budget-Aware Evaluation of LLM Reasoning Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06461/) (2024)
- [MCC-KD: Multi-CoT Consistent Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14747/) (2023)
- [Mind's Mirror: Distilling Self-Evaluation Capability and Comprehensive Thinking from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09214/) (2023)
- [Reducing Reasoning Costs: The Path of Optimization for Chain of Thought via Sparse Attention Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09111/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Reasoning Beyond Language: A Comprehensive Survey on Latent Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16782/) (2025)
- [Don't Overthink It: A Survey of Efficient R1-style Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02120/) (2025)
- [DRP: Distilled Reasoning Pruning with Skill-aware Step Decomposition for Efficient Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13975/) (2025)
- [Exploring the System 1 Thinking Capability of Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10368/) (2025)
- [Not All Tokens Matter: Towards Efficient LLM Reasoning via Token Significance in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08125/) (2025)
- [Exploring Knowledge Purification in Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01064/) (2026)
- [CoT-Evo: Evolutionary Distillation of Chain-of-Thought for Scientific Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13166/) (2025)
- [More Than One Teacher: Adaptive Multi-Guidance Policy Optimization for Diverse Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02227/) (2025)
- [ReaLM: Reflection-Enhanced Autonomous Reasoning with Small Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12387/) (2025)
- [Beyond Model Scaling: Test-Time Intervention for Efficient Deep Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11252/) (2026)
- [ACTD: Anchor-Based Cross-Tokenizer Distillation with Residual Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29662/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in problem-solving by incorporating reasoning processes. However, this enhanced reasoning capability results in an increased number of output tokens during inference, leading to higher computational costs. To address this challenge, we propose TwT (Thinking without Tokens), a method that reduces inference-time costs through habitual reasoning distillation with multi-teachers' guidance, while maintaining high performance. Our approach introduces a Habitual Reasoning Distillation method, which internalizes explicit reasoning into the model's habitual behavior through a Teacher-Guided compression strategy inspired by human cognition. Additionally, we propose Dual-Criteria Rejection Sampling (DCRS), a technique that generates a high-quality and diverse distillation dataset using multiple teacher models, making our method suitable for unsupervised scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that TwT effectively reduces inference costs while preserving superior performance, achieving up to a 13.6% improvement in accuracy with fewer output tokens compared to other distillation methods, offering a highly practical solution for efficient LLM deployment.