TwT: Thinking without Tokens by Habitual Reasoning Distillation with Multi-Teachers’ Guidance

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission2022 Authors

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in problem-solving by incorporating reasoning processes. However, this enhanced reasoning capability results in an increased number of output tokens during inference, leading to higher computational costs. To address this challenge, we propose TwT (Thinking without Tokens), a method that reduces inference-time costs through habitual reasoning distillation with multi-teachers' guidance, while maintaining high performance. Our approach introduces a Habitual Reasoning Distillation method, which internalizes explicit reasoning into the model's habitual behavior through a Teacher-Guided compression strategy inspired by human cognition. Additionally, we propose Dual-Criteria Rejection Sampling (DCRS), a technique that generates a high-quality and diverse distillation dataset using multiple teacher models, making our method suitable for unsupervised scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that TwT effectively reduces inference costs while preserving superior performance, achieving up to a 13.6% improvement in accuracy with fewer output tokens compared to other distillation methods, offering a highly practical solution for efficient LLM deployment.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Efficient/Low-Resource Methods for NLP

Research Area Keywords: Large Language Model; Knowledge Distillation; LLM Reasoning; Inference-time Computational Cost

Contribution Types: Approaches low compute settings-efficiency

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 2022