FOLIO

DAIS: Dependency-aware intermediate QA supervision improves complex reasoning in LLMs

Researchers introduce DAIS (Dependency-Aware Intermediate QA Supervision), a training-time framework that converts teacher rationales into stage-level QA records where each intermediate step is conditioned on prior reasoning states. Evaluated on GDPR, AIACT, MedQA, and FOLIO benchmarks using Qwen backbones, DAIS outperforms answer-only, flat chain-of-thought, and independent-QA baselines, with up to 5.6% and average 4.2% gains on policy-compliance tasks. Ablations confirm that dependency conditioning contributes beyond simply adding more intermediate text, suggesting it as a lightweight auxiliary supervision signal.