Woodpecker Distillation: Weak Models Diagnose Reasoning Bugs in Strong Models

arXiv cs.AIAugust 7, 2026en

arXiv:2608.05168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models often fail on reasoning tasks despite possessing the capability to solve them. We argue that many such failures arise from localized reasoning bugs in intermediate steps rather than from global incompetence. We show that these bugs are frequently repairable: inserting a short patch generated by a weak probe model after the same strong-model reasoning prefix can redirect the trajectory toward a correct solution. However, this corrective effect is not reliably internalized by directly fine-tuning on weak patches or repaired trajectories, suggesting that the useful signal lies not in the intervention text itself, but in how i

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