Mingfeng Xue

CL
h-index7
6papers
1,359citations
Novelty54%
AI Score50

6 Papers

27.1CLOct 9, 2023Code
How Abilities in Large Language Models are Affected by Supervised Fine-tuning Data Composition

Guanting Dong, Hongyi Yuan, Keming Lu et al. · tsinghua

Large language models (LLMs) with enormous pre-training tokens and parameters emerge diverse abilities, including math reasoning, code generation, and instruction following. These abilities are further enhanced by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). While the open-source community has explored ad-hoc SFT for enhancing individual capabilities, proprietary LLMs exhibit versatility across various skills. Therefore, understanding the facilitation of multiple abilities via SFT is paramount. In this study, we specifically focuses on the interplay of data composition between mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general human-aligning abilities during SFT. We propose four intriguing research questions to explore the association between model performance and various factors including data amount, composition ratio, model size and SFT strategies. Our experiments reveal that distinct capabilities scale differently and larger models generally show superior performance with same amount of data. Mathematical reasoning and code generation consistently improve with increasing data amount, whereas general abilities plateau after roughly a thousand samples. Moreover, we observe data composition appears to enhance various abilities under limited data conditions, yet can lead to performance conflicts when data is plentiful. Our findings also suggest the amount of composition data influences performance more than the composition ratio. In analysis of SFT strategies, we find that sequentially learning multiple skills risks catastrophic forgetting. Our proposed Dual-stage Mixed Fine-tuning (DMT) strategy offers a promising solution to learn multiple abilities with different scaling patterns.

13.5CLJul 4, 2024Code
DotaMath: Decomposition of Thought with Code Assistance and Self-correction for Mathematical Reasoning

Chengpeng Li, Guanting Dong, Mingfeng Xue et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have made impressive progress in handling simple math problems, yet they still struggle with more challenging and complex mathematical tasks. In this paper, we introduce a series of LLMs that employs the Decomposition of thought with code assistance and self-correction for mathematical reasoning, dubbed as DotaMath. DotaMath models tackle complex mathematical tasks by decomposing them into simpler logical subtasks, leveraging code to solve these subtasks, obtaining fine-grained feedback from the code interpreter, and engaging in self-reflection and correction. By annotating diverse interactive tool-use trajectories and employing query evolution on GSM8K and MATH datasets, we generate an instruction fine-tuning dataset called DotaMathQA with 574K query-response pairs. We train a series of base LLMs using imitation learning on DotaMathQA, resulting in DotaMath models that achieve remarkable performance compared to open-source LLMs across various in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks. Notably, DotaMath-deepseek-7B showcases an outstanding performance of 64.8% on the competitive MATH dataset and 86.7% on GSM8K. Besides, DotaMath-deepseek-7B maintains strong competitiveness on a series of in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks (Avg. 80.1%). Looking forward, we anticipate that the DotaMath paradigm will open new pathways for addressing intricate mathematical problems. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ChengpengLi1003/DotaMath.

49.0CLSep 18, 2024
Qwen2.5-Math Technical Report: Toward Mathematical Expert Model via Self-Improvement

An Yang, Beichen Zhang, Binyuan Hui et al.

In this report, we present a series of math-specific large language models: Qwen2.5-Math and Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct-1.5B/7B/72B. The core innovation of the Qwen2.5 series lies in integrating the philosophy of self-improvement throughout the entire pipeline, from pre-training and post-training to inference: (1) During the pre-training phase, Qwen2-Math-Instruct is utilized to generate large-scale, high-quality mathematical data. (2) In the post-training phase, we develop a reward model (RM) by conducting massive sampling from Qwen2-Math-Instruct. This RM is then applied to the iterative evolution of data in supervised fine-tuning (SFT). With a stronger SFT model, it's possible to iteratively train and update the RM, which in turn guides the next round of SFT data iteration. On the final SFT model, we employ the ultimate RM for reinforcement learning, resulting in the Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct. (3) Furthermore, during the inference stage, the RM is used to guide sampling, optimizing the model's performance. Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct supports both Chinese and English, and possess advanced mathematical reasoning capabilities, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR). We evaluate our models on 10 mathematics datasets in both English and Chinese, such as GSM8K, MATH, GaoKao, AMC23, and AIME24, covering a range of difficulties from grade school level to math competition problems.

5.7CLApr 28, 2022
Tailor: A Prompt-Based Approach to Attribute-Based Controlled Text Generation

Kexin Yang, Dayiheng Liu, Wenqiang Lei et al.

Attribute-based Controlled Text Generation (CTG) refers to generating sentences that satisfy desirable attributes (e.g., emotions and topics). Existing works often utilize fine-tuning or resort to extra attribute classifiers, yet suffer from storage and inference time increases. To address these concerns, we explore attribute-based CTG in a prompt-based manner. In short, the proposed Tailor represents each attribute as a pre-trained continuous vector (i.e., single-attribute prompt) and guides the generation of a fixed PLM switch to a pre-specified attribute. We experimentally find that these prompts can be simply concatenated as a whole to multi-attribute CTG without any re-training, yet raises problems of fluency decrease and position sensitivity. To this end, Tailor provides a multi-attribute prompt mask and a re-indexing position-ids sequence to bridge the gap between the training (one prompt for each task) and testing stage (concatenating more than one prompt). To further enhance such single-attribute prompt combinations, Tailor also introduces a trainable prompt connector, which can be concatenated with any two single-attribute prompts to multi-attribute text generation. Experiments on 11 attribute-specific generation tasks demonstrate strong performances of Tailor on both single-attribute and multi-attribute CTG, with 0.08\% training parameters of a GPT-2.

17.0CLJun 11, 2025Code
CoRT: Code-integrated Reasoning within Thinking

Chengpeng Li, Zhengyang Tang, Ziniu Li et al.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) like o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown remarkable progress in natural language reasoning with long chain-of-thought (CoT), yet they remain inefficient or inaccurate when handling complex mathematical operations. Addressing these limitations through computational tools (e.g., computation libraries and symbolic solvers) is promising, but it introduces a technical challenge: Code Interpreter (CI) brings external knowledge beyond the model's internal text representations, thus the direct combination is not efficient. This paper introduces CoRT, a post-training framework for teaching LRMs to leverage CI effectively and efficiently. As a first step, we address the data scarcity issue by synthesizing code-integrated reasoning data through Hint-Engineering, which strategically inserts different hints at appropriate positions to optimize LRM-CI interaction. We manually create 30 high-quality samples, upon which we post-train models ranging from 1.5B to 32B parameters, with supervised fine-tuning, rejection fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Our experimental results demonstrate that Hint-Engineering models achieve 4\% and 8\% absolute improvements on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B respectively, across five challenging mathematical reasoning datasets. Furthermore, Hint-Engineering models use about 30\% fewer tokens for the 32B model and 50\% fewer tokens for the 1.5B model compared with the natural language models. The models and code are available at https://github.com/ChengpengLi1003/CoRT.

9.6CLOct 23, 2025Code
Teaching Language Models to Reason with Tools

Chengpeng Li, Zhengyang Tang, Ziniu Li et al.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) like OpenAI-o1 have shown impressive capabilities in natural language reasoning. However, these models frequently demonstrate inefficiencies or inaccuracies when tackling complex mathematical operations. While integrating computational tools such as Code Interpreters (CIs) offers a promising solution, it introduces a critical challenge: a conflict between the model's internal, probabilistic reasoning and the external, deterministic knowledge provided by the CI, which often leads models to unproductive deliberation. To overcome this, we introduce CoRT (Code-Optimized Reasoning Training), a post-training framework designed to teach LRMs to effectively utilize CIs. We propose \emph{Hint-Engineering}, a new data synthesis strategy that strategically injects diverse hints at optimal points within reasoning paths. This approach generates high-quality, code-integrated reasoning data specifically tailored to optimize LRM-CI interaction. Using this method, we have synthesized 30 high-quality samples to post-train models ranging from 1.5B to 32B parameters through supervised fine-tuning. CoRT further refines the multi-round interleaving of external CI usage and internal thinking by employing rejection sampling and reinforcement learning. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate CoRT's effectiveness, yielding absolute improvements of 4\% and 8\% on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, respectively, across five challenging mathematical reasoning datasets. Moreover, CoRT significantly enhances efficiency, reducing token usage by approximately 30\% for the 32B model and 50\% for the 1.5B model compared to pure natural language reasoning baselines. The models and code are available at: https://github.com/ChengpengLi1003/CoRT.