DART: Distilling Autoregressive Reasoning to Silent Thought

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission2804 Authors

Abstract:

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) in solving complex tasks.
However, its autoregressive paradigm leads to significant computational overhead, hindering its deployment in latency-sensitive applications.
To address this, we propose **DART** (**D**istilling **A**utoregressive **R**easoning to Silent **T**hought), a self-distillation framework that enables LLMs to replace autoregressive CoT with non-autoregressive Silent Thought (ST). Specifically, DART introduces two training pathways: the CoT pathway for traditional reasoning and the ST pathway for generating answers directly from a few ST tokens. The ST pathway utilizes a lightweight Reasoning Evolvement Module (REM) to align its hidden states with the CoT pathway, enabling the ST tokens to evolve into informative embeddings. During inference, only the ST pathway is activated, leveraging evolving ST tokens to deliver the answer directly. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DART achieves comparable reasoning performance to existing baselines while offering significant efficiency gains, serving as a feasible alternative for efficient reasoning.

Paper Type: Short

Research Area: Language Modeling

Research Area Keywords: Efficient LLM Reasoning, Implicit Reasoning

Contribution Types: Approaches low compute settings-efficiency

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 2804