{"pk":50163,"title":"Cognitive Distillation with Parameter-Efficient LLMs: Chain-of-Thought Calibration for Personality Prediction","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) excel at personality prediction but are often impractical for deployment due to high computational demands. This work introduces cognitive distillation with Chain-of-Thought calibration, a novel framework for transferring structured reasoning from large LLMs to smaller, efficient models. Inspired by cognitive architectures like ACT-R, our method aligns intermediate inference steps using exemplars from single or multiple LLMs. A 1.5B-parameter model distilled through this process surpasses Qwen1.5-110B in predictive accuracy, achieving a 28% improvement in Pearson correlation while using just 1.36% of its parameters. Ablation studies reveal that moderate sampling diversity and multi-model ensembles enhance cognitive skill transfer and construct validity. These findings demonstrate that high-level reasoning can be efficiently and faithfully transferred, enabling psychometrically robust personality assessment in resource-constrained settings. This approach bridges AI and cognitive science, offering a scalable path toward plausible, cognitively grounded language models.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Artificial Intelligence; Psychology; Natural Language Processing"}],"section":"Abstracts with Poster Presentation (accepted as Abstracts)","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6jz3j9d5","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Yang","middle_name":"","last_name":"Yan","name_suffix":"","institution":"Zhejiang University – Westlake University Joint PhD Program","department":""},{"first_name":"Lizhi","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ma","name_suffix":"","institution":"Hangzhou Normal University","department":""},{"first_name":"Yu","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lu","name_suffix":"","institution":"Engineering School","department":""},{"first_name":"Renjun","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xu","name_suffix":"","institution":"Zhejiang University","department":""},{"first_name":"Zhenzhong","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lan","name_suffix":"","institution":"Engineering School","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50163/galley/38125/download/"}]}