Towards Faithful Multi-step Reasoning through Fine-Grained Causal-aware Attribution Reasoning Distillation

Zheng Chu, Jingchang Chen, Zhongjie Wang, Guo Tang, Qianglong Chen, Ming Liu, Bing Qin

Abstract: Despite the remarkable reasoning capabilities demonstrated by large language models (LLM), the substantial computational overhead limits their practices. Some efforts have been directed toward distilling multi-step reasoning capabilities into smaller models through chain-of-thought (CoT). While CoT facilitates multi-step reasoning, the dependencies between reasoning steps are not always clearly discernible, which may lead to inconsistent reasoning. In this paper, we introduce fine-grained attribution reasoning distillation (FARD), which incorporates grounded citations to consolidate the relationships between reasoning steps. Specifically, FARD distills attribution reasoning rationales from LLMs to substitute CoT reasonings, which clarifies the dependencies among reasoning steps. Besides, we regularize the model’s attention pattern by leveraging the causal dependencies between reasoning steps, thereby enhancing the consistency of reasoning. Grounded attribution reasoning also enhances interpretability and verifiability, thereby facilitating faithful reasoning. We evaluate FARD on mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks. The experimental results indicate that FARD outperforms CoT distillation methods in mathematical reasoning, demonstrating its effectiveness. Furthermore, the small models trained with FARD have shown outstanding performance in out-of-distribution reasoning, proving strong generalization capabilities.