FLAMES: Improving LLM Math Reasoning via a Fine-Grained Analysis of the Data Synthesis Pipeline

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Seegmiller, Parker, Mehta, Kartik, Saha, Soumya, Tao, Chenyang, Oraby, Shereen, Gupta, Arpit, Chung, Tagyoung, Bansal, Mohit, Peng, Nanyun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914001022091264
author Seegmiller, Parker
Mehta, Kartik
Saha, Soumya
Tao, Chenyang
Oraby, Shereen
Gupta, Arpit
Chung, Tagyoung
Bansal, Mohit
Peng, Nanyun
author_facet Seegmiller, Parker
Mehta, Kartik
Saha, Soumya
Tao, Chenyang
Oraby, Shereen
Gupta, Arpit
Chung, Tagyoung
Bansal, Mohit
Peng, Nanyun
contents Recent works improving LLM math reasoning with synthetic data have used unique setups, making comparison of data synthesis strategies impractical. This leaves many unanswered questions about the roles of different factors in the synthetic data pipeline, such as the impact of filtering low-quality problems. To address this gap, we introduce FLAMES, a Framework for LLM Assessment of Math rEasoning Data Synthesis, and perform a systematic study of 10 existing data synthesis strategies and multiple other factors impacting the performance of synthetic math reasoning data. Our FLAMES experiments provide several valuable insights about the optimal balance of difficulty and diversity of synthetic data. First, data agents designed to increase problem complexity lead to best improvements on most math metrics. Second, with a fixed data generation budget, keeping higher problem coverage is more important than keeping only problems with reliable solutions. Third, GSM8K- and MATH-based synthetic data can lead to improvements on competition-level benchmarks, showcasing easy-to-hard generalization. Leveraging insights from our FLAMES experiments, we design two novel data synthesis strategies for improving out-of-domain generalization and robustness. Further, we develop the FLAMES dataset, an effective blend of our novel and existing data synthesis strategies, outperforming public datasets on OlympiadBench (+15.7), CollegeMath (+4.5), GSMPlus (+6.5), and MATH (+3.1). Fine-tuning Qwen2.5-Math-7B on the FLAMES dataset achieves 81.4% on MATH, surpassing larger Llama3 405B, GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_16514
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FLAMES: Improving LLM Math Reasoning via a Fine-Grained Analysis of the Data Synthesis Pipeline
Seegmiller, Parker
Mehta, Kartik
Saha, Soumya
Tao, Chenyang
Oraby, Shereen
Gupta, Arpit
Chung, Tagyoung
Bansal, Mohit
Peng, Nanyun
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Recent works improving LLM math reasoning with synthetic data have used unique setups, making comparison of data synthesis strategies impractical. This leaves many unanswered questions about the roles of different factors in the synthetic data pipeline, such as the impact of filtering low-quality problems. To address this gap, we introduce FLAMES, a Framework for LLM Assessment of Math rEasoning Data Synthesis, and perform a systematic study of 10 existing data synthesis strategies and multiple other factors impacting the performance of synthetic math reasoning data. Our FLAMES experiments provide several valuable insights about the optimal balance of difficulty and diversity of synthetic data. First, data agents designed to increase problem complexity lead to best improvements on most math metrics. Second, with a fixed data generation budget, keeping higher problem coverage is more important than keeping only problems with reliable solutions. Third, GSM8K- and MATH-based synthetic data can lead to improvements on competition-level benchmarks, showcasing easy-to-hard generalization. Leveraging insights from our FLAMES experiments, we design two novel data synthesis strategies for improving out-of-domain generalization and robustness. Further, we develop the FLAMES dataset, an effective blend of our novel and existing data synthesis strategies, outperforming public datasets on OlympiadBench (+15.7), CollegeMath (+4.5), GSMPlus (+6.5), and MATH (+3.1). Fine-tuning Qwen2.5-Math-7B on the FLAMES dataset achieves 81.4% on MATH, surpassing larger Llama3 405B, GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
title FLAMES: Improving LLM Math Reasoning via a Fine-Grained Analysis of the Data Synthesis Pipeline
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16514