Kevin Li

Thinking Slow, Fast: Scaling Inference Compute with Distilled Reasoners

Daniele Paliotta*
Junxiong Wang*
Matteo Pagliardini*
Kevin Y. Li*
Aviv Bick
J. Zico Kolter
Albert Gu
François Fleuret
Tri Dao
arXiv, 2025

Abstract

Recent advancements have demonstrated that the performance of large language models (LLMs) can be significantly enhanced by scaling computational resources at test time. A common strategy involves generating multiple Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories and aggregating their outputs through various selection mechanisms. This raises a fundamental question: can models with lower complexity leverage their superior generation throughput to outperform similarly sized Transformers for a fixed computational budget? To address this question and overcome the lack of strong subquadratic reasoners, we distill pure and hybrid Mamba models from pretrained Transformers. Trained on only 8 billion tokens, our distilled models show strong performance and scaling on mathematical reasoning datasets while being much faster at inference for large batches and long sequences. Despite the zero-shot performance hit due to distillation, both pure and hybrid Mamba models can scale their coverage and accuracy performance past their Transformer teacher models under fixed time budgets, opening a new direction for scaling inference compute.

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BibTeX

			
@misc{paliotta2025thinkingslowfastscaling,
    title={Thinking Slow, Fast: Scaling Inference Compute with Distilled Reasoners}, 
    author={Daniele Paliotta and Junxiong Wang and Matteo Pagliardini and Kevin Y. Li and Aviv Bick and J. Zico Kolter and Albert Gu and François Fleuret and Tri Dao},
    year={2025},
    eprint={2502.20339},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    primaryClass={cs.CL},
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20339}, 
  }