LightReasoner: Can Small Language Models Teach Large Language Models Reasoning?

📰 ArXiv cs.AI

arXiv:2510.07962v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in reasoning, often through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, SFT is resource-intensive, relying on large curated datasets, rejection-sampled demonstrations, and uniform optimization across all tokens, even though only a fraction carry meaningful learning value. In this work, we explore a counterintuitive idea: can smaller language models (SLMs) teach larger language

Published 23 May 2026

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Title: LightReasoner: Can Small Language Models Teach Large Language Models Reasoning?

Abstract:
arXiv:2510.07962v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in reasoning, often through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, SFT is resource-intensive, relying on large curated datasets, rejection-sampled demonstrations, and uniform optimization across all tokens, even though only a fraction carry meaningful learning value. In this work, we explore a counterintuitive idea: can smaller language models (SLMs) teach larger language
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