Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) excel across diverse tasks, benefiting from knowledge priors, in-context reasoning, and test-time computation. Despite these strengths, single-model reasoning remains vulnerable to error propagation, as later steps depend on the model's earlier outputs, leaving reasoning blind spots difficult to independently reassess. To address this limitation, we develop \textit{collaborative learning}, encompassing the construction of heterogeneous collaborators and the learning of effective cross-model collaboration. Specifically, \textit{model slicing} replaces a large model with smaller, heterogeneous models under a comparable parameter budget, enabling prior reasoning to be reassessed across distinct model parameterizations. \textit{Pyramid supervision} combines protocol distillation with step-level supervision to refine reasoning and interaction decisions throughout collaboration. We evaluate our approach across four task categories: multi-hop question answering, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and open-ended constrained generation. The trained heterogeneous models achieve comparable or better task performance than the original large model and established multi-agent baselines, including reinforcement-learning-based methods, while also achieving higher inference efficiency than the multi-agent baselines and exhibiting differentiated collaboration patterns across tasks. These findings show that learned collaboration turns model heterogeneity into complementary reasoning capabilities.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12927
