ScaleDiff: Scaling Difficult Problems for Advanced Mathematical Reasoning

Qizhi Pei, Zhuoshi Pan, Honglin Lin, Xin Gao, Yu Li, Zinan Tang, Conghui He, Rui Yan, Lijun Wu

Keywords: mathematical reasoning, difficulty-aware, data augmentation, data synthesis

Abstract:

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown impressive capabilities in complex problem-solving, often benefiting from training on difficult mathematical problems that stimulate intricate reasoning.
Recent efforts have explored automated synthesis of mathematical problems by prompting proprietary models or large-scale open-source models from seed data or inherent mathematical concepts.
However, scaling up these methods remains challenging due to their high computational/API cost, complexity of prompting, and limited difficulty level of the generated problems.
To overcome these limitations, we propose ScaleDiff, a simple yet effective pipeline designed to scale the creation of difficult problems.
We efficiently identify difficult problems from existing datasets with only a single forward pass using an adaptive thinking model, which can perceive problem difficulty and automatically switch between "Thinking" and "NoThinking" modes.
We then train a specialized difficult problem generator (DiffGen-8B) on this filtered difficult data, which can produce new difficult problems in large scale, eliminating the need for complex, per-instance prompting and its associated high API costs.
Fine-tuning Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct on the ScaleDiff-Math dataset yields a substantial performance increase of 11.3% compared to the original dataset and achieves a 65.9% average accuracy on AIME'24, AIME'25, HMMT-Feb'25, BRUMO'25, and MATH500, outperforming recent strong LRMs like OpenThinker3.
Notably, this performance is achieved using the cost-efficient Qwen3-8B model as a teacher, demonstrating that our pipeline can effectively transfer advanced reasoning capabilities without relying on larger, more expensive teacher models.
We also observe a clear scaling phenomenon in model performance on difficult benchmarks as the quantity of difficult problems increases.
Our code is available at the anonymous repository \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ScaleDiff-D053}.

Primary Area: datasets and benchmarks

Submission Number: 11396