Efficient Chain-of-Thought Learning for Domain-Specific Language Models
Keywords:
chain-of-thought learning; domain-specific language models; efficient reasoning; model distillation; deployment governance; socio-technical systemsAbstract
Chain-of-thought prompting has become an influential technique for improving reasoning in large language models by eliciting intermediate explanations before final answers. While effective, this approach increases inference latency, memory pressure, energy consumption, and operational complexity. These costs are especially problematic in domain-specific deployments such as clinical documentation, legal analysis, financial compliance, and engineering design support. Efficient chain-of-thought learning attempts to preserve reasoning quality while reducing the number of explicit inference-time tokens and the size of the deployed model. This paper presents a system-level analysis of efficient chain-of-thought learning for domain-specific language models. It examines architectural trade-offs related to sparsity, quantization, and reasoning compression. It further discusses data selection, curriculum design, trajectory filtering, and alignment for compact models. The paper frames reasoning not as a property of a single model but as an infrastructure resource shaped by deployment economics, observability, robustness, fairness, and governance. By integrating technical and socio-technical perspectives, the discussion highlights structural tensions among accuracy, explicitness, auditability, and sustainability. The paper concludes that efficient chain-of-thought learning should be designed as a broader reasoning infrastructure rather than a narrow model compression task.
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