rStar-Math: Small LLMs Can Master Math Reasoning with Self-Evolved Deep
  Thinking
Authors: name: Xinyu Guan; name: Li Lyna Zhang; name: Yifei Liu; name: Ning Shang; name: Youran Sun; name: Yi Zhu; name: Fan Yang; name: Mao Yang
Published: 2025-01-08 14:12:57

Abstract: We present rStar-Math to demonstrate that small language models (SLMs) can
rival or even surpass the math reasoning capability of OpenAI o1, without
distillation from superior models. rStar-Math achieves this by exercising "deep
thinking" through Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), where a math policy SLM
performs test-time search guided by an SLM-based process reward model.
rStar-Math introduces three innovations to tackle the challenges in training
the two SLMs: (1) a novel code-augmented CoT data sythesis method, which
performs extensive MCTS rollouts to generate step-by-step verified reasoning
trajectories used to train the policy SLM; (2) a novel process reward model
training method that avoids na\"ive step-level score annotation, yielding a
more effective process preference model (PPM); (3) a self-evolution recipe in
which the policy SLM and PPM are built from scratch and iteratively evolved to
improve reasoning capabilities. Through 4 rounds of self-evolution with
millions of synthesized solutions for 747k math problems, rStar-Math boosts
SLMs' math reasoning to state-of-the-art levels. On the MATH benchmark, it
improves Qwen2.5-Math-7B from 58.8% to 90.0% and Phi3-mini-3.8B from 41.4% to
86.4%, surpassing o1-preview by +4.5% and +0.9%. On the USA Math Olympiad
(AIME), rStar-Math solves an average of 53.3% (8/15) of problems, ranking among
the top 20% the brightest high school math students. Code and data will be
available at https://github.com/microsoft/rStar.