NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper
AdaSTaR: Adaptive Data Sampling for Training Self-Taught Reasoners
- Reiss Koh
- Wonbeen Oh
- Jaein Jang
- MinHyung Lee
- Hyeongjin Kim
- Ah Kim
- Joonkee Kim
- Junghyun Lee
Self-Taught Reasoners (STaR), synonymously known as Rejection sampling Fine-Tuning (RFT), is an integral part of the training pipeline of self-improving reasoning Language Models (LMs). The self-improving mechanism often employs random observation (data) sampling. However, this results in trained observation imbalance; inefficiently over-training on solved examples while under-training on challenging ones. In response, we introduce Adaptive STaR (AdaSTaR), a novel algorithm that rectifies this by integrating two adaptive sampling principles: (1) Adaptive Sampling for Diversity: promoting balanced training across observations, and (2) Adaptive Sampling for Curriculum: dynamically adjusting data difficulty to match the model's evolving strength. Across six benchmarks, AdaSTaR achieves best test accuracy in all instances (6/6) and reduces training FLOPs by an average of 58. 6\% against an extensive list of baselines. These improvements in performance and efficiency generalize to different pre-trained LMs and larger models, paving the way for more efficient and effective self-improving LMs.