MinT: Boosting Generalization in Mathematical Reasoning via Multi-view Fine-tuning

Zhenwen Liang, Dian Yu, Xiaoman Pan, Wenlin Yao, Qingkai Zeng, Xiangliang Zhang, Dong Yu


Abstract
Reasoning in mathematical domains remains a significant challenge for relatively small language models (LMs). Many current methods focus on specializing LMs in mathematical reasoning and rely heavily on distilling knowledge from powerful yet inefficient large LMs (LLMs). In this work, we explore a new direction that avoids over-reliance on LLM teachers, introducing a multi-view fine-tuning method that efficiently exploits existing mathematical problem datasets with diverse annotation styles. Our approach uniquely considers the various annotation formats as different “views” that may help each other and leverage them in training the model. By postpending distinct instructions to input questions, models can learn to generate solutions in diverse formats in a flexible manner. Experimental results show that our strategy enables relatively small LMs to outperform prior approaches that heavily rely on knowledge distillation, as well as carefully established baselines. Additionally, the proposed method grants the models promising generalization ability across various views and datasets, and the capability to learn from inaccurate or incomplete noisy data. We hope our multi-view training paradigm could inspire future studies in other machine reasoning domains.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.988
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
11307–11318
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.988
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhenwen Liang, Dian Yu, Xiaoman Pan, Wenlin Yao, Qingkai Zeng, Xiangliang Zhang, and Dong Yu. 2024. MinT: Boosting Generalization in Mathematical Reasoning via Multi-view Fine-tuning. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 11307–11318, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
MinT: Boosting Generalization in Mathematical Reasoning via Multi-view Fine-tuning (Liang et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.988.pdf