Soft Teacher Forcing

Abstract: Soft tokens have so far been used to replace discrete chain-of-thought in latent reasoning methods. These approaches typically require multi-stage training and, in some cases, auxiliary modules, yet they still underperform supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on <input, chain-of-thought, output> triples. In this paper, we ask whether soft tokens can be used to improve SFT itself, instead of as an avenue for latent reasoning. We introduce Soft Teacher Forcing (Soft-TF), a simple training algorithm that combines teacher-forced embeddings with soft tokens through random convex combinations. The soft tokens are computed in a single parallel forward pass over the ground-truth sequence. Soft-TF adds no parameters, no external model and no curriculum, and leaves inference unchanged. Experiments show that Soft-TF improves over SFT on GSM8K, MATH, MathQA and AQuA, by +2.1 to +4.1 points on GSM8K across seven Gemma, Llama and Mistral models.