2025.findings-acl.216@ACL

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#1 Autonomous Data Selection with Zero-shot Generative Classifiers for Mathematical Texts [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Yifan Zhang, Yifan Luo, Yang Yuan, Andrew C Yao

We present Autonomous Data Selection (AutoDS), a method that leverages base language models as zero-shot “generative classifiers” to automatically curate high-quality mathematical texts. Unlike prior approaches that require human annotations or training a dedicated data filter, AutoDS relies solely on a model’s logits to determine whether a given passage is mathematically informative and educational. By integrating AutoDS into a continual pretraining pipeline, we substantially boost downstream performance on challenging math benchmarks (MATH, GSM8K, and BBH) while using far fewer tokens than previous methods. Empirically, our approach achieves roughly a twofold improvement in pretraining token efficiency over strong baselines, underscoring the potential of self-directed data selection in enhancing mathematical reasoning. We will release our curated dataset to facilitate future research in automated domain-specific data curation.

Subject: ACL.2025 - Findings