Skill-Targeted Adaptive Training
Authors: name: Yinghui He; name: Abhishek Panigrahi; name: Yong Lin; name: Sanjeev Arora
Published: 2025-10-11 05:02:36

Abstract: Language models often show little to no improvement (i.e., "saturation") when
trained via vanilla supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on data similar to what they
saw in their training set (e.g., MATH). We introduce a new fine-tuning
strategy, STAT, to train such a student model by using the metacognition
ability of a stronger large language model (LLM) as the teacher. The teacher
uses the task dataset to create a list of skills needed for the task, and then
labels each data point with its required skills (Didolkar et al., 2024). By
monitoring the student's answers, the teacher creates a Missing-Skill-Profile
for the student, tracking how often they failed to apply each skill in their
responses. We use this idea to build a modified training set in one of two
ways. In STAT-Sel, the teacher uses an existing set of training examples but
adaptively reweights them according to the Missing-Skill-Profile. In STAT-Syn,
the teacher synthesizes additional examples involving missing skills. Across
extensive experiments on Llama and Qwen models, our methods yield improvements
of up to 7.5% on MATH, whereas SFT provides only limited gains. Furthermore,
STAT enhances performance on out-of-distribution benchmarks (e.g., AIME24/25,
AMC23, etc.) by an average of 4.6%. Crucially, we find that STAT is
complementary to RL via GRPO (Shao et al., 2024): after the model is improved
using STAT to address skill gaps, GRPO continues to add further gains. We
conclude that skill-targeted adaptive training should broadly improve current
training pipelines. Our code is available at:
https://github.com/princeton-pli/STAT.