MetaSynth: Meta-Prompting-Driven Agentic Scaffolds for Diverse Synthetic Data Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Riaz, Haris, Bhabesh, Sourav, Arannil, Vinayak, Ballesteros, Miguel, Horwood, Graham
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Riaz, Haris
Bhabesh, Sourav
Arannil, Vinayak
Ballesteros, Miguel
Horwood, Graham
author_facet Riaz, Haris
Bhabesh, Sourav
Arannil, Vinayak
Ballesteros, Miguel
Horwood, Graham
contents Recent smaller language models such Phi-3.5 and Phi-4 rely on synthetic data generated using larger Language models. Questions remain about leveraging synthetic data for other use cases, such as adapting LLMs to specific domains. A key limitation of synthetic data is low diversity, which negatively impacts its downstream applicability for improving other models. To address this, we propose MetaSynth, a method for generating synthetic data that enhances diversity through meta-prompting, where a language model orchestrates multiple "expert" LLM agents to collaboratively generate data. Using only 25 million tokens of synthetic data generated with MetaSynth, we successfully adapt a well-trained LLM (Mistral-7B-v0.3) to two specialized domains-Finance and Biomedicine-without compromising the capabilities of the resulting model in general tasks. In addition, we evaluate the diversity of our synthetic data using seven automated metrics, and find that it approaches the diversity of LLM pre-training corpora. Continually pre-training Mistral-7B-v0.3 with MetaSynth notably outperforms the base LLM, showing improvements of up to 4.08% in Finance and 13.75% in Biomedicine. The same model shows degraded performance when trained on data generated using a template prompt, even when the template includes prior generations and varying In-Context exemplars of real data. Our findings suggest that a few million tokens of diverse synthetic data without mixing any real data, is sufficient for effective domain adaptation when using MetaSynth.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_12563
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MetaSynth: Meta-Prompting-Driven Agentic Scaffolds for Diverse Synthetic Data Generation
Riaz, Haris
Bhabesh, Sourav
Arannil, Vinayak
Ballesteros, Miguel
Horwood, Graham
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Recent smaller language models such Phi-3.5 and Phi-4 rely on synthetic data generated using larger Language models. Questions remain about leveraging synthetic data for other use cases, such as adapting LLMs to specific domains. A key limitation of synthetic data is low diversity, which negatively impacts its downstream applicability for improving other models. To address this, we propose MetaSynth, a method for generating synthetic data that enhances diversity through meta-prompting, where a language model orchestrates multiple "expert" LLM agents to collaboratively generate data. Using only 25 million tokens of synthetic data generated with MetaSynth, we successfully adapt a well-trained LLM (Mistral-7B-v0.3) to two specialized domains-Finance and Biomedicine-without compromising the capabilities of the resulting model in general tasks. In addition, we evaluate the diversity of our synthetic data using seven automated metrics, and find that it approaches the diversity of LLM pre-training corpora. Continually pre-training Mistral-7B-v0.3 with MetaSynth notably outperforms the base LLM, showing improvements of up to 4.08% in Finance and 13.75% in Biomedicine. The same model shows degraded performance when trained on data generated using a template prompt, even when the template includes prior generations and varying In-Context exemplars of real data. Our findings suggest that a few million tokens of diverse synthetic data without mixing any real data, is sufficient for effective domain adaptation when using MetaSynth.
title MetaSynth: Meta-Prompting-Driven Agentic Scaffolds for Diverse Synthetic Data Generation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12563