Papers with math problems
MathPrompter: Mathematical Reasoning using Large Language Models (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) can be attributed to massive scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a technique that improves performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on arithmetic problems along with increased reliance in the predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique improves performance on arithmetic problems and increases confidence in the output results. |
Automatic Generation of High Quality CCGbanks for Parser Domain Adaptation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) parsing are limited to a specific parser architecture, making it non-trivial to apply to current parsers. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain adaptation method for Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) they propose to generate CCG corpora using cheaper dependency trees. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on speech conversation and math problems. |
LLMs Know More About Numbers than They Can Say (2026.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in mathematical, scientific, financial and engineering domains. |
| Approach: | They probe the hidden states of several smaller open-source LLMs to find out how big they are . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves verbalized accuracy by 3.22% over base models. |
ProcessBench: Identifying Process Errors in Mathematical Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Chujie Zheng, Zhenru Zhang, Beichen Zhang, Runji Lin, Keming Lu, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Jingren Zhou, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Existing models fail to generalize to more challenging math problems, authors say . existing benchmarks related to assessing language models' reasoning process are limited . |
| Approach: | They propose a tool to measure language models' ability to identify erroneous steps in reasoning . they use two types of models: process reward models and critic models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in evaluating language models' reasoning process . the best open-source model has demonstrated the critique capability competitive with the proprietary model . |
Learning Multi-Step Reasoning by Solving Arithmetic Tasks (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated large LMs’ impressive performance in solving math problems, but such ability seems only to emerge from models with abundant parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose to continuously pre-train LMs with the capabilities of multi-step reasoning by continuously pretraining them on a synthetic dataset MsAT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LMs' multi-step reasoning abilities on four math word problem datasets. |
A Generation-based Deductive Method for Math Word Problems (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing generation methods suffer from repeated sub-expression generation and deductive methods are restricted to dealing with binary operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multivariate directed acyclic graph (mDAG) which generates the topological ordering of mDAg by equipping a generation model with a re-encoder to keep the deductive property but avoid the expensive enumeration of deductive methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on the widely used benchmarks and solves multivariate operators on the CMWPA benchmark. |
MathGenie: Generating Synthetic Data with Question Back-translation for Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning of LLMs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models have demonstrated outstanding capabilities in mathematical reasoning, but there is a performance gap between open-source models and closed-source ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating diverse and reliable math problems by leveraging the ground-truth solutions of the seed data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models across five representative mathematical reasoning datasets. |
AceMath: Advancing Frontier Math Reasoning with Post-Training and Reward Modeling (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we introduce a suite of math models that excel in solving complex math problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised fine-tuning process that achieves competitive performance across general domains, followed by targeted fine- tuning for the math domain using a carefully curated set of prompts and synthetically generated responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Qwen2.5-Math-72B-Instruct, GPT-4o and Claude-3.5 Sonnet in the math domain. |
Learning to Solve Domain-Specific Calculation Problems with Knowledge-Intensive Programs Generator (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Domain Large Language Models (LLMs) are developed for domain-specific tasks based on general LLMs, but it still requires professional knowledge to facilitate the expertise for some domain- specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to solve domain-specific calculation problems with KIPG . they use it to extract key variables and calculate outcomes dependent on domain knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline solves domain-specific calculation problems more effectively . it generates knowledge-intensive programs according to the domain- specific documents . |
Self-attention-based Graph-of-Thought for Math Problem Solving (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating reasoning paths in a chain structure are inefficient and non-human-like. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding method for a chain-based LLM that constructs a thought graph simultaneously as an LLM inference and generates reasoning steps with a graph-structured self-attention mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves reasoning accuracy without huge computational over-expensive LLMs and avoids performance degradation issues when the LLM is too small to comprehend complex prompts. |
MathFish: Evaluating Language Model Math Reasoning via Grounding in Educational Curricula (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | pedagogical experts spend months reviewing published math problems to ensure that they align with critical skills or concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for evaluating language models' mathematical abilities by combining a dataset of 385 fine-grained descriptions of K-12 math skills and concepts with 9.9K math problems labeled with these standards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can discern skills and concepts enabled by math content, and it can be used to assess language models' mathematical abilities. |
WebAgent-R1: Training Web Agents via End-to-End Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhepei Wei, Wenlin Yao, Yao Liu, Weizhi Zhang, Qin Lu, Liang Qiu, Changlong Yu, Puyang Xu, Chao Zhang, Bing Yin, Hyokun Yun, Lihong Li
| Challenge: | Existing work on reinforcement learning has focused on single-turn tasks such as solving math problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that learns directly from online interactions by asynchronously generating diverse trajectories, guided by binary rewards depending on task success. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the WebArena-Lite benchmark show that the framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and strong proprietary models. |
ConceptMath: A Bilingual Concept-wise Benchmark for Measuring Mathematical Reasoning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Yanan Wu, Jie Liu, Xingyuan Bu, Jiaheng Liu, Zhanhui Zhou, Yuanxing Zhang, Chenchen Zhang, ZhiqiBai ZhiqiBai, Haibin Chen, Tiezheng Ge, Wanli Ouyang, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | ConceptMath evaluates concept-wise mathematical reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing benchmarks that evaluate general mathematical reasoning with an average accuracy fail to probe the fine-grained failure modes of mathematical reasoning on specific datasets. |
| Approach: | They introduce a bilingual, fine-grained benchmark that evaluates concept-wise mathematical reasoning of Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks evaluate concept-wise mathematical reasoning of Large Language Models with concept-based accuracies. |
Continual Pre-training of Language Models for Math Problem Understanding with Syntax-Aware Memory Network (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a fundamental challenge in modeling math problems is how to fuse semantics of textual description and formulas. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to continually pre-train language models for improving understanding of math problems with syntax-aware memory networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms competitive baselines on four math tasks. |
An Empirical Study of Multilingual Reasoning Distillation for Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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Patomporn Payoungkhamdee, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Jinheon Baek, Potsawee Manakul, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich, Sarana Nutanong
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to distill reasoning capabilities have focused mainly on English, leaving multilingual distillation underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates incorrect rationales as additional guidance to improve multilingual reasoning in large language models. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that d-CoT-nR significantly surpasses the baseline, improving accuracy in unseen languages and correctness in step-by-step reasoning. |
TheoremQA: A Theorem-driven Question Answering Dataset (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent LLMs like GPT-4 and PaLM-2 have made tremendous progress in solving fundamental math problems like GSM8K by achieving over 90% accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use theorem-driven question-answering dataset to evaluate AI models' ability to apply theoretic concepts to solving challenging science problems. |
| Outcome: | TheoremQA is curated by domain experts and contains 800 high-quality questions covering 350 theoremics from Math, Physics, EE&CS, and Finance. |
Shorten After You’re Right: Lazy Length Penalties for Reasoning RL (2026.findings-acl)
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Danlong Yuan, Tian Xie, Shaohan Huang, Huishuai Zhang, Zhuocheng Gong, Chong Luo, Furu Wei, Dongyan Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing shortening methods for long reasoning models rely on additional supervision or multi-stage post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a lazy length penalty that imposes length pressure on models without extra training stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces response length without extra training stages while maintaining or improving performance. |
Meta-Reasoner: Dynamic Guidance for Optimized Inference-time Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances on prompting and post-training have enabled LLMs to perform step-wise reasoning tasks, but they tend to explore unproductive solution paths without effective backtracking or strategy adjustment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that empowers LLMs to “think about how to think” and dynamically adapts reasoning strategies in real-time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms previous SOTA methods by 9-12% in accuracy while reducing inference time by 28-35% under the same compute budget. |
From A and B to A+B: Can Large Language Models Solve Compositional Math Problems? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies that create problem variants by adding perturbations to a single problem focus on the interaction between problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline with 98.2% accuracy to combine two original problems with a logical connection and to evaluate LLMs' generalization ability on the compositional problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can combine two original problems with a logical connection to get a new math problem and evaluate its compositional generalization on the compositional problems. |
A Survey of Deep Learning for Mathematical Reasoning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a survey of deep learning for mathematical reasoning examines the field . a comprehensive reading list is provided to assist readers interested in the field. |
| Approach: | They present a survey of deep learning for mathematical reasoning over the past decade . they outline directions for future research and highlight potential for further exploration . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the results of a decade-long survey of deep learning for mathematical reasoning. |
Improving Autoformalization Using Direct Dependency Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucinate formal dependencies lack scalability and precision to leverage ever-growing public datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented framework based on Direct Dependency Retrieval to generate formal dependencies from natural-language mathematical descriptions and verify their existence via an efficient Suffix Array Check (SAC). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in retrieval precision and recall and can be used to validate formal representations in a public dataset. |
Can LLMs simulate the same correct solutions to free-response math problems as real students? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored modeling student mistakes, but lack of understanding of how they generate correct solutions. |
| Approach: | They compare distribution of correct solutions produced by four large language models with students' responses to free-response problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate correct solutions that represent student responses to free-response problems. |
QaRL: Rollout-Aligned Quantization-Aware RL for Fast and Stable Training under Training–Inference Mismatch (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Gu, Hao Wang, Jiacheng Liu, Lujun Li, Qiyuan Zhu, Bei Liu, Binxing Xu, Lei Wang, Xintong Yang, Sida Lin, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning with simple rule-based reward functions (RLVR) can induce emergent reasoning behaviors and yield gains in challenging domains such as math problem solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a rollout-alignment-quantization-aware RL which aligns training-side forward with the quantized rollout to minimize mismatch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms quantized-rollout training by +5.5 on Qwen3-30B-A3B MoE for math problems while maintaining low-bit throughput. |
Understanding the Thinking Process of Reasoning Models: A Perspective from Schoenfeld’s Episode Theory (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ming Li, Nan Zhang, Chenrui Fan, Hong Jiao, Yanbin Fu, Sydney Peters, Qingshu Xu, Robert Lissitz, Tianyi Zhou
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) generate extensive chain-of-thought reasoning, but we lack a principled framework for understanding how these thoughts are structured. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to analyze the reasoning traces of Large Reasoning Models using Schoenfeld’s Episode Theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a theoretically grounded methodology for interpreting LRM cognition and enables future work on more controllable and transparent reasoning systems. |
Solving for X and Beyond: Can Large Language Models Solve Complex Math Problems with More-Than-Two Unknowns? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Large Language Models often feature simple problems with only one or two unknown variables, which do not sufficiently challenge their reasoning capacities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark, BeyondX, which progressively increases complexity by expanding the number of unknowns in simpler problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance on the BeyondX benchmark and provides deeper insights into the computational limits of LLMs when faced with more complex mathematical challenges. |
BloomEval: A Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LRMs via Cognitive Hierarchy Trace (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Large Reasoning Models rely on answer correctness, but fail to assess the structural coherence and cognitive soundness of the reasoning process itself. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that maps a model's reasoning trajectory onto hierarchical cognitive levels and an annotation pipeline to ensure a scalable yet reliable annotation pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects hierarchy jumps, breaks, and overthinking errors and enables scalable yet reliable annotation. |
Diverse Multi-tool Aggregation with Large Language Models for Enhanced Math Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-TAG uses multiple tools to solve complex math problems over multiple reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-based LLM framework that leverages multiple tools to solve math problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines that use individual tools with the same number of runs and significantly outperformed standard baselines. |