Sondos Mahmoud Bsharat
2026
Prompting Test-Time Scaling Is A Strong LLM Reasoning Data Augmentation
Sondos Mahmoud Bsharat | Zhiqiang Shen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Sondos Mahmoud Bsharat | Zhiqiang Shen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning when guided by chain-of-thought exemplars, yet collecting large, high-quality reasoning datasets remains laborious and resource-intensive. We introduce Prompting Test-Time Scaling (P-TTS), a prompt-space data augmentation framework for enhancing LLM reasoning via fine-tuning. In P-TTS, scaling refers to systematic expansion of the prompt space during offline teacher-data generation, not to increased inference-time compute for the deployed student. Rather than collecting thousands of examples, P-TTS starts from a small pool of 90 manually selected reasoning instances and applies principled instruction templates and paraphrased prompt variants to elicit diverse reasoning trajectories from a teacher model, producing a compact synthetic training set. We fine-tune Qwen-2.5 models of multiple sizes on the resulting data. On reasoning benchmarks including AIME25, MATH500, and GPQA-Diamond, P-TTS consistently improves accuracy over competitive small-data baselines such as S1 and S1.1 (1K-shot), with the largest gains on AIME25 while remaining strong on MATH500 and GPQA-Diamond. P-TTS also improves generalization on out-of-domain reasoning evaluations. Ablations show that exemplar diversity and prompt-space scaling are critical drivers of improvement, suggesting that prompt scaling explores the latent space of reasoning patterns, amplifying LLM problem-solving with minimal annotation overhead. P-TTS offers a practical, low-cost way to elicit strong LLM reasoning in resource-constrained or rapidly evolving domains. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/PTTS.
2025
DRAG: Distilling RAG for SLMs from LLMs to Transfer Knowledge and Mitigate Hallucination via Evidence and Graph-based Distillation
Jennifer Chen | Aidar Myrzakhan | Yaxin Luo | Hassaan Muhammad Khan | Sondos Mahmoud Bsharat | Zhiqiang Shen
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jennifer Chen | Aidar Myrzakhan | Yaxin Luo | Hassaan Muhammad Khan | Sondos Mahmoud Bsharat | Zhiqiang Shen
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have proven highly effective for tasks requiring factual consistency and robust knowledge retrieval. However, large-scale RAG systems consume significant computational resources and are prone to generating “hallucinated” content from Humans. In this work, we introduce DRAG, a novel framework for distilling RAG knowledge from large-scale Language Models (LLMs) into small LMs (SLMs). Our approach leverages evidence- and knowledge graph–based distillation, ensuring that the distilled model retains critical factual knowledge while significantly reducing model size and computational cost. By aligning the smaller model’s predictions with a structured knowledge graph and ranked evidence, DRAG effectively mitigates hallucinations and improves factual accuracy. We further present a case demonstrating how our framework mitigates user privacy risks and introduce a corresponding benchmark. Experimental evaluations on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the prior competitive RAG methods like MiniRAG for SLMs by up to 27.7% using the same models, preserving high-level efficiency and reliability. With DRAG, we provide a practical and resource-efficient roadmap to deploying enhanced retrieval and generation capabilities in small-size LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/DRAG.