NaturalThoughts: Selecting and Distilling Reasoning Traces for General Reasoning Tasks

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01921v1
• Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2025 17:30:24 GMT
• Title: NaturalThoughts: Selecting and Distilling Reasoning Traces for General Reasoning Tasks
• Authors: Yang Li, Youssef Emad, Karthik Padthe, Jack Lanchantin, Weizhe Yuan, Thao Nguyen, Jason Weston, Shang-Wen Li, Dong Wang, Ilia Kulikov, Xian Li,
• Abstract summary: We select reasoning traces from a strong teacher model based on a large pool of questions from NaturalReasoning.<n>We find that simply scaling up data size with random sampling is a strong baseline with steady performance gains.<n>We find that selecting difficult examples that require more diverse reasoning strategies is more sample-efficient to transfer the teacher model's reasoning skills.
• Score: 65.70224757972068
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Recent work has shown that distilling reasoning traces from a larger teacher model via supervised finetuning outperforms reinforcement learning with the smaller student model alone (Guo et al. 2025). However, there has not been a systematic study of what kind of reasoning demonstrations from the teacher are most effective in improving the student model's reasoning capabilities. In this work we curate high-quality "NaturalThoughts" by selecting reasoning traces from a strong teacher model based on a large pool of questions from NaturalReasoning (Yuan et al. 2025). We first conduct a systematic analysis of factors that affect distilling reasoning capabilities, in terms of sample efficiency and scalability for general reasoning tasks. We observe that simply scaling up data size with random sampling is a strong baseline with steady performance gains. Further, we find that selecting difficult examples that require more diverse reasoning strategies is more sample-efficient to transfer the teacher model's reasoning skills. Evaluated on both Llama and Qwen models, training with NaturalThoughts outperforms existing reasoning datasets such as OpenThoughts, LIMO, etc. on general STEM reasoning benchmarks including GPQA-Diamond, MMLU-Pro and SuperGPQA.

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