Distilling Multi-Step Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models into Smaller Models via Semantic Decompositions

Step-by-step reasoning approaches like chain-of-thought (CoT) have proved to be a very effective technique to induce reasoning capabilities in large language models. However, the success of the CoT approach depends primarily on model size, and often billion parameter-scale models are needed to get CoT to work. In this paper, we propose a knowledge distillation approach, that leverages the step-by-step CoT reasoning capabilities of larger models and distils these reasoning abilities into smaller models. Our approach Decompositional Distillation learns a semantic decomposition of the original problem into a sequence of subproblems and uses it to train two models: a) a problem decomposer that learns to decompose the complex reasoning problem into a sequence of simpler sub-problems and b) a problem solver that uses the intermediate subproblems to solve the overall problem. On a multi-step math word problem dataset (GSM8K), we boost the performance of GPT-2 variants up to 35% when distilled with our approach compared to CoT. We show that using our approach, it is possible to train a GPT-2-large model (775M) that can outperform a 10X larger GPT-3 (6B) model trained using CoT reasoning. Finally, we also demonstrate that our approach of problem decomposition can also be used as an alternative to CoT prompting, which boosts the GPT-3 performance by 40% compared to CoT prompts.