Research spotlight: is long chain-of-thought structure all that matters when it comes to LLM reasoning distillation?

We’re taking a look at the research paper, LLMs can easily learn to reason from demonstration (Li et al., 2025), in this week’s community research spotlight. It focuses on how the structure of reasoning traces impacts distillation from models such as DeepSeek R1. What’s the big idea regarding LLM reasoning distillation?