Training Specialist Models Without Reasoning Trajectories: Latent Paths Drive Distillation Trade-offs
Yilei Tu · hf · 2026-09-16
A new study on Hugging Face shows that specialist domain-expert distillation can work without explicit reasoning-trajectory supervision.
The key finding: training without explicit reasoning supervision implicitly selects latent reasoning trajectories inside the model, and these hidden trajectories govern the trade-off between specialization and generalization in the distilled student models.
This offers a new approach for vertical-domain distillation when reasoning trace annotations are unavailable.
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