Learning from Reasoning Failures via Synthetic Data Generation

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Stan, Gabriela Ben Melech, Aflalo, Estelle, Madasu, Avinash, Lal, Vasudev, Howard, Phillip
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866918282032840704
author Stan, Gabriela Ben Melech
Aflalo, Estelle
Madasu, Avinash
Lal, Vasudev
Howard, Phillip
author_facet Stan, Gabriela Ben Melech
Aflalo, Estelle
Madasu, Avinash
Lal, Vasudev
Howard, Phillip
contents Training models on synthetic data has emerged as an increasingly important strategy for improving the performance of generative AI. This approach is particularly helpful for large multimodal models (LMMs) due to the relative scarcity of high-quality paired image-text data compared to language-only data. While a variety of methods have been proposed for generating large multimodal datasets, they do not tailor the synthetic data to address specific deficiencies in the reasoning abilities of LMMs which will be trained with the generated dataset. In contrast, humans often learn in a more efficient manner by seeking out examples related to the types of reasoning where they have failed previously. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new approach for synthetic data generation which is grounded in the analysis of an existing LMM's reasoning failures. Our methodology leverages frontier models to automatically analyze errors produced by a weaker LMM and propose new examples which can be used to correct the reasoning failure via additional training, which are then further filtered to ensure high quality. We generate a large multimodal instruction tuning dataset containing over 553k examples using our approach and conduct extensive experiments demonstrating its utility for improving the performance of LMMs on multiple downstream tasks. Our results show that models trained on our synthetic data can even exceed the performance of LMMs trained on an equivalent amount of additional real data, demonstrating the high value of generating synthetic data targeted to specific reasoning failure modes in LMMs. We will make our dataset and code publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_14523
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning from Reasoning Failures via Synthetic Data Generation
Stan, Gabriela Ben Melech
Aflalo, Estelle
Madasu, Avinash
Lal, Vasudev
Howard, Phillip
Artificial Intelligence
Training models on synthetic data has emerged as an increasingly important strategy for improving the performance of generative AI. This approach is particularly helpful for large multimodal models (LMMs) due to the relative scarcity of high-quality paired image-text data compared to language-only data. While a variety of methods have been proposed for generating large multimodal datasets, they do not tailor the synthetic data to address specific deficiencies in the reasoning abilities of LMMs which will be trained with the generated dataset. In contrast, humans often learn in a more efficient manner by seeking out examples related to the types of reasoning where they have failed previously. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new approach for synthetic data generation which is grounded in the analysis of an existing LMM's reasoning failures. Our methodology leverages frontier models to automatically analyze errors produced by a weaker LMM and propose new examples which can be used to correct the reasoning failure via additional training, which are then further filtered to ensure high quality. We generate a large multimodal instruction tuning dataset containing over 553k examples using our approach and conduct extensive experiments demonstrating its utility for improving the performance of LMMs on multiple downstream tasks. Our results show that models trained on our synthetic data can even exceed the performance of LMMs trained on an equivalent amount of additional real data, demonstrating the high value of generating synthetic data targeted to specific reasoning failure modes in LMMs. We will make our dataset and code publicly available.
title Learning from Reasoning Failures via Synthetic Data Generation
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14523