Long-Document QA with Chain-of-Structured-Thought and Fine-Tuned SLMs
Large language models (LLMs) are widely applied to data analytics over documents, yet direct reasoning over long, noisy documents remains brittle and error-prone. Hence, we study document question answering (QA) that consolidates dispersed evidence into a structured output (e.g., a table, graph, or chunks) to support reliable, verifiable QA. We propose a two-pillar framework, LiteCoST, to achieve both high accuracy and low latency with small language models (SLMs). Pillar 1: Chain-of-Structured-Thought (CoST). We introduce a CoST template, a schema-aware instruction that guides a strong LLM to produce both a step-wise CoST trace and the corresponding structured output. The process induces...
| Authors | Zhuowen Liang, Xiaotian Lin, Zhengxuan Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 31 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 March 2026 |
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