Entropy-Based Adaptive Weighting for Self-Training

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wang, Xiaoxuan, Deng, Yihe, Ma, Mingyu Derek, Wang, Wei
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wang, Xiaoxuan
Deng, Yihe
Ma, Mingyu Derek
Wang, Wei
author_facet Wang, Xiaoxuan
Deng, Yihe
Ma, Mingyu Derek
Wang, Wei
contents The mathematical problem-solving capabilities of large language models have become a focal point of research, with growing interests in leveraging self-generated reasoning paths as a promising way to refine and enhance these models. These paths capture step-by-step logical processes while requiring only the correct answer for supervision. The self-training method has been shown to be effective in reasoning tasks while eliminating the need for external models and manual annotations. However, optimizing the use of self-generated data for model training remains an open challenge. In this work, we propose Entropy-Based Adaptive Weighting for Self-Training (EAST), an adaptive weighting strategy designed to prioritize uncertain data during self-training. Specifically, EAST employs a mapping function with a tunable parameter that controls the sharpness of the weighting, assigning higher weights to data where the model exhibits greater uncertainty. This approach guides the model to focus on more informative and challenging examples, thereby enhancing its reasoning ability. We evaluate our approach on GSM8K and MATH benchmarks. Empirical results show that, while the vanilla method yields virtually no improvement (0%) on MATH, EAST achieves around a 1% gain over backbone model. On GSM8K, EAST attains a further 1-2% performance boost compared to the vanilla method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_23913
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Entropy-Based Adaptive Weighting for Self-Training
Wang, Xiaoxuan
Deng, Yihe
Ma, Mingyu Derek
Wang, Wei
Computation and Language
The mathematical problem-solving capabilities of large language models have become a focal point of research, with growing interests in leveraging self-generated reasoning paths as a promising way to refine and enhance these models. These paths capture step-by-step logical processes while requiring only the correct answer for supervision. The self-training method has been shown to be effective in reasoning tasks while eliminating the need for external models and manual annotations. However, optimizing the use of self-generated data for model training remains an open challenge. In this work, we propose Entropy-Based Adaptive Weighting for Self-Training (EAST), an adaptive weighting strategy designed to prioritize uncertain data during self-training. Specifically, EAST employs a mapping function with a tunable parameter that controls the sharpness of the weighting, assigning higher weights to data where the model exhibits greater uncertainty. This approach guides the model to focus on more informative and challenging examples, thereby enhancing its reasoning ability. We evaluate our approach on GSM8K and MATH benchmarks. Empirical results show that, while the vanilla method yields virtually no improvement (0%) on MATH, EAST achieves around a 1% gain over backbone model. On GSM8K, EAST attains a further 1-2% performance boost compared to the vanilla method.
title Entropy-Based Adaptive Weighting for Self-Training
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23913