The Quest for Efficient Reasoning: A Data-Centric Benchmark to CoT
  Distillation
Authors: name: Ruichen Zhang; name: Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan; name: Zhen Tan; name: Dawei Li; name: Song Wang; name: Tianlong Chen
Published: 2025-05-24 15:54:19

Abstract: Data-centric distillation, including data augmentation, selection, and
mixing, offers a promising path to creating smaller, more efficient student
Large Language Models (LLMs) that retain strong reasoning abilities. However,
there still lacks a comprehensive benchmark to systematically assess the effect
of each distillation approach. This paper introduces DC-CoT, the first
data-centric benchmark that investigates data manipulation in chain-of-thought
(CoT) distillation from method, model and data perspectives. Utilizing various
teacher models (e.g., o4-mini, Gemini-Pro, Claude-3.5) and student
architectures (e.g., 3B, 7B parameters), we rigorously evaluate the impact of
these data manipulations on student model performance across multiple reasoning
datasets, with a focus on in-distribution (IID) and out-of-distribution (OOD)
generalization, and cross-domain transfer. Our findings aim to provide
actionable insights and establish best practices for optimizing CoT
distillation through data-centric techniques, ultimately facilitating the
development of more accessible and capable reasoning models. The dataset can be
found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/rana-shahroz/DC-COT, while our code is
shared in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DC-COT-FF4C/.