Revisiting Chain-of-Thought Reasoning under Limited Supervision: Semi-supervised Chain-of-Thought Learning
Researchers propose Semi-CoT, a semi-supervised framework that leverages unlabeled questions to generate reliable pseudo-reasoning chains for training large language models.
Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
Title:Revisiting Chain-of-Thought Reasoning under Limited Supervision: Semi-supervised Chain-of-Thought Learning
View PDFAbstract:Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as an effective approach for activating latent reasoning capabilities in large language models. However, most existing CoT methods use reasoning chains mainly as inference-time prompts, while the generated reasoning traces are rarely reused as semi-supervised learning signals. In this report, we define \textbf{Semi-supervised Chain-of-Thought Learning} and propose \textbf{Semi-CoT}, a simple framework that uses unlabeled questions to construct pseudo reasoning supervision. Semi-CoT samples multiple pseudo-CoTs for each unlabeled question, estimates answer-level semantic entropy, and selects low-entropy reasoning chains as reliable pseudo-CoT demonstrations. This extends the self-training view of CoT from inference-time refinement to semi-supervised pseudo-supervision. Pilot experiments on AQuA, SVAMP, GSM8K, and MultiArith show that the entropy gate selects high-precision pseudo-CoTs, with pseudo-answer precision ranging from $91.36%$ to $100%$. Semi-CoT also gives small gains on SVAMP and GSM8K, while AQuA shows negative transfer and MultiArith reaches a ceiling. These results suggest that unlabeled questions can provide reliable pseudo reasoning signals, but their effective use still requires stronger demonstration selection or student training.
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Source: arXiv cs.AI Recent
