Large Language Models Are Reasoning Teachers

Language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on downstream tasks, using in-context exemplars or human instructions. Recent works have shown that chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting can elicit models to solve complex reasoning tasks, step-by-step. However, the efficacy of prompt-based CoT methods is restricted to very large LMs such as GPT-3 (175B), thus limiting deployability. In this paper, we revisit the fine-tuning approach to enable complex reasoning in smaller LMs, optimized to efficiently perform a specific task. We propose Fine-tune-CoT, a method that leverages the capabilities of very large LMs to generate reasoning samples and teach smaller models via fine-tuning. We evaluate our method on publicly available LMs across a wide range of complex tasks and model sizes. We find that Fine-tune-CoT enables substantial reasoning capability in small models, whereas previous prompt-based baselines exhibit near-random performance. Student models can even outperform the teacher in some tasks while reducing model size requirements by several orders of magnitude. We conduct extensive ablations and sample studies to understand the reasoning capabilities of student models. We also identify several important nuances that have been overlooked in concurrent fine-tuning works on CoT and address them in our analysis.