Facts Don't Speak Louder than Words: The Behavioral Essence of Long-CoT Distillation
While long chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation significantly improves the reasoning abilities of language models, its underlying mechanism remains poorly understood. Current pipelines generally rely on rejection sampling to gather reasoning traces across diverse prompts, assuming that factual correctness and broad problem coverage are indispensable. Surprisingly, we find that training exclusively on flawed reasoning trajectories or a restricted prompt set yields nearly comparable performance. Driven by this counterintuitive finding, we propose the Behavioral Hypothesis: the essence of Long-CoT distillation is behavioral alignment with structured reasoning patterns, rather than factual kno...
| Authors | Yongcan Yu, Jian Liang, Lingxiao He et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 October 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 15 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.