Marco-o1 v2: Towards Widening The Distillation Bottleneck for Reasoning Models (2503.01461v2)

Abstract: Large Reasoning Models(LRMs) such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities by scaling test-time compute and generating long Chain-of-Thought(CoT). Distillation--post-training on LRMs-generated data--is a straightforward yet effective method to enhance the reasoning abilities of smaller models, but faces a critical bottleneck: we found that distilled long CoT data poses learning difficulty for small models and leads to the inheritance of biases (i.e. over-thinking) when using Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods. To alleviate this bottleneck, we propose constructing tree-based CoT data from scratch via Monte Carlo Tree Search(MCTS). We then exploit a set of CoT-aware approaches, including Thoughts Length Balance, Fine-grained DPO, and Joint Post-training Objective, to enhance SFT and RL on the constructed data. We conduct evaluation on various benchmarks such as math (GSM8K, MATH, AIME). instruction-following (Multi-IF) and planning (Blocksworld), results demonstrate our approaches substantially improve the reasoning performance of distilled models compared to standard distilled models via reducing the hallucinations in long-time thinking. The project homepage is https://github.com/AIDC-AI/Marco-o1.