An Empirical Study of Multilingual Reasoning Distillation for Question Answering

Abstract

Reasoning is one crucial capability in Large Language Models (LLMs), allowing them to perform complex tasks such as solving math problems and multi-step planning. While reasoning capability can emerge in larger models, smaller ones usually have to rely on distillation to transfer this capability from a larger model. However, recent efforts to distill reasoning capabilities have focused mainly on English, leaving multilingual distillation underexplored. To address this gap, this paper examines existing English reasoning distillation methods that utilize a variety of positive rationales in multilingual settings and proposes d-CoT-nR, a novel approach that incorporates incorrect rationales as additional guidance. Empirical results from multilingual high-school examinations show that d-CoT-nR significantly surpasses the baseline, improving accuracy in unseen languages and correctness in step-by-step reasoning.