Improving In-Context Learning with Reasoning Distillation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10647v1
• Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2025 18:59:10 GMT
• Title: Improving In-Context Learning with Reasoning Distillation
• Authors: Nafis Sadeq, Xin Xu, Zhouhang Xie, Julian McAuley, Byungkyu Kang, Prarit Lamba, Xiang Gao,
• Abstract summary: Language models rely on semantic priors to perform in-context learning.<n>We propose ReDis, a reasoning distillation technique designed to improve the inductive reasoning capabilities of language models.
• Score: 25.377625891065236
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Language models rely on semantic priors to perform in-context learning, which leads to poor performance on tasks involving inductive reasoning. Instruction-tuning methods based on imitation learning can superficially enhance the in-context learning performance of language models, but they often fail to improve the model's understanding of the underlying rules that connect inputs and outputs in few-shot demonstrations. We propose ReDis, a reasoning distillation technique designed to improve the inductive reasoning capabilities of language models. Through a careful combination of data augmentation, filtering, supervised fine-tuning, and alignment, ReDis achieves significant performance improvements across a diverse range of tasks, including 1D-ARC, List Function, ACRE, and MiniSCAN. Experiments on three language model backbones show that ReDis outperforms equivalent few-shot prompting baselines across all tasks and even surpasses the teacher model, GPT-4o, in some cases. ReDis, based on the LLaMA-3 backbone, achieves relative improvements of 23.2%, 2.8%, and 66.6% over GPT-4o on 1D-ARC, ACRE, and MiniSCAN, respectively, within a similar hypothesis search space. The code, dataset, and model checkpoints will be made available at https://github.com/NafisSadeq/reasoning-distillation.git.

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