ControlMath: Controllable Data Generation Promotes Math Generalist Models

Nuo Chen, Ning Wu, Jianhui Chang, Linjun Shou, Jia Li


Abstract
Utilizing large language models (LLMs) for data augmentation has yielded encouraging results in mathematical reasoning. However, these approaches face constraints in problem diversity, potentially restricting them to in-domain/distribution data generation. To this end, we propose **ControlMath**, an iterative method involving an equation-generator module and two LLM-based agents. The module creates diverse equations, which the Problem-Crafter agent then transforms into math word problems. The Reverse-Agent filters and selects high-quality data, adhering to the “less is more” principle. This approach enables the generation of diverse math problems, not limited to specific domains or distributions. As a result, we collect ControlMathQA, which involves 190k math word problems. Extensive results prove that combining our dataset with in-domain datasets like GSM8K can help improve the model’s mathematical ability to generalize, leading to improved performance both within and beyond specific domains.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.680
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12201–12217
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.680
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nuo Chen, Ning Wu, Jianhui Chang, Linjun Shou, and Jia Li. 2024. ControlMath: Controllable Data Generation Promotes Math Generalist Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 12201–12217, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ControlMath: Controllable Data Generation Promotes Math Generalist Models (Chen et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.680.pdf