May 13, 2026, cs.CLJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Yumeng Zhang, Zhengbang Yang, Yevin Nikhel Goonatilake, Zhuangdi Zhu
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
Distilling reasoning traces from strong large language models into smaller ones is a promising route to improve intelligence in resource-constrained settings. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: offline distillation from teacher-generated traces provides high-quality, sample-efficient supervision but suffers from distributional drift: during training, the student model conditions on teacher-generated prefixes, whereas during inference the student autoregresses on self-generated prefixes, leading to compounding errors over long reasoning trajectories. Meanwhile, on-policy or self-distillation methods better match the student's inference-time distribution, but require costly online sampling and often produce low-quality traces in early training. We propose a principled offline reasoning distillation framework that preserves the efficiency and supervision quality of offline teacher-generated data while correcting teacher-student distribution drift. It adaptively emphasizes teacher supervision that is better aligned with the student's on-policy distribution. Evaluations on mathematical reasoning benchmarks of GSM8K, MATH, MATH500, and harder held-out competition-style tasks, including AMC, AIME, and OlympiadBench, show that our method improves reasoning accuracy over prior offline distillation algorithms and yields more stable reasoning traces while preserving instruction-following capabilities. Our work shows that lightweight, distribution-correction-aware training can substantially strengthen offline reasoning distillation without online rollouts.