---
title: "Reasoning Distillation"
created: 2026-04-15
updated: 2026-04-15
type: concept
tags: [distillation, reasoning]
sources: []
---

# Reasoning Distillation

Reasoning distillation is the process of transferring reasoning abilities — particularly [[chain-of-thought]] capabilities — from a teacher model to a student model. This is a specialized form of [[knowledge-distillation]] that focuses on preserving the quality and structure of reasoning traces rather than just final answer accuracy. The [[on-policy-distillation-survey]] discusses reasoning distillation methods, including approaches like [[deepseek-r1-distillation]].

## Related

- [[on-policy-distillation-survey]] — Surveys reasoning distillation approaches
- [[chain-of-thought]] — CoT traces are the primary target of reasoning distillation
- [[knowledge-distillation]] — Broader knowledge distillation framework
- [[deepseek-r1-distillation]] — A prominent example of reasoning distillation in practice

## References