Masked Self-Distillation: Internalizing the Chain-of-Thought in Language Models
Large Reasoning Models produce long, explicit chains of intermediate steps before generating a final answer at inference time. These intermediate traces dominate latency, memory usage, and serving cost, even though final answer correctness is not causally related to the trace correctness and the trace length is not a reliable indicator of the problem complexity. This raises an obvious question: can the computation expressed in these intermediate tokens be internalized into the parameters of a language model, enabling it to produce answers with much shorter intermediate traces? We propose masked self-distillation, a knowledge-distillation based post-training framework in which copies of th...
| Authors | Durgesh Kalwar, Vardhan Palod, Jaya Adithya Pavuluri et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 18 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 September 2026 |
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