# LLM2LLM: Boosting LLMs with Novel Iterative Data Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15042 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15042/

## Key facts

- Cited by 70 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11206/) (2023)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [The Flan Collection: Designing Data and Methods for Effective Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13688/) (2023)
- [AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06364/) (2023)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [Self-Rewarding Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10020/) (2024)
- [Self-Play Fine-Tuning Converts Weak Language Models to Strong Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01335/) (2024)
- [Reinforced Self-Training (ReST) for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08998/) (2023)
- [Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities With Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09390/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Data Augmentation Approaches for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03075/) (2021)
- [Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02707/) (2023)
- [Snips Voice Platform: an embedded Spoken Language Understanding system for private-by-design voice interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10190/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [Towards Large Reasoning Models: A Survey of Reinforced Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09686/) (2025)
- [Plan-and-Act: Improving Planning of Agents for Long-Horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09572/) (2025)
- [Chain of Preference Optimization: Improving Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09136/) (2024)
- [Multiagent Finetuning: Self Improvement with Diverse Reasoning Chains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05707/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Self-Evolution of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14387/) (2024)
- [STAIR: Improving Safety Alignment with Introspective Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02384/) (2025)
- [Instruction Pre-Training: Language Models are Supervised Multitask Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14491/) (2024)
- [TinyAgent: Function Calling at the Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00608/) (2024)
- [SiriuS: Self-improving Multi-agent Systems via Bootstrapped Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04780/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Data Synthesis and Augmentation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12896/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Small Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20011/) (2024)
- [I-SHEEP: Self-Alignment of LLM from Scratch through an Iterative Self-Enhancement Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08072/) (2024)
- [Efficient and Scalable Estimation of Tool Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02141/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Self-Instruct: Synthetic Abstract Image and Visual Reasoning Instruction Using Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07053/) (2024)
- [ProVision: Programmatically Scaling Vision-centric Instruction Data for Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07012/) (2024)
- [LEMMA: Learning from Errors for MatheMatical Advancement in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17439/) (2025)
- [Bootstrapping Language-Guided Navigation Learning with Self-Refining Data Flywheel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08467/) (2024)
- [Interactive Evolution: A Neural-Symbolic Self-Training Framework For Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11736/) (2024)
- [ANAH-v2: Scaling Analytical Hallucination Annotation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04693/) (2024)
- [COAST: Enhancing the Code Debugging Ability of LLMs through Communicative Agent Based Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05006/) (2024)
- [Montessori-Instruct: Generate Influential Training Data Tailored for Student Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14208/) (2024)
- [On Domain-Adaptive Post-Training for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19930/) (2024)
- [LLMs-as-Instructors: Learning from Errors Toward Automating Model Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00497/) (2024)
- [Math Neurosurgery: Isolating Language Models' Math Reasoning Abilities Using Only Forward Passes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16930/) (2024)
- [Aurelia: Test-time Reasoning Distillation in Audio-Visual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23219/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Efficient Large Language Model Training: From Data-centric Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25817/) (2025)
- [Honesty to Subterfuge: In-Context Reinforcement Learning Can Make Honest Models Reward Hack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06491/) (2024)
- [Self-Augmented Preference Optimization: Off-Policy Paradigms for Language Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20830/) (2024)
- [Aligning Instruction Tuning with Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09368/) (2025)
- [Middo: Model-Informed Dynamic Data Optimization for Enhanced LLM Fine-Tuning via Closed-Loop Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21589/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are currently state-of-the-art for solving the vast majority of natural language processing tasks. While many real-world applications still require fine-tuning to reach satisfactory levels of performance, many of them are in the low-data regime, making fine-tuning challenging. To address this, we propose LLM2LLM, a targeted and iterative data augmentation strategy that uses a teacher LLM to enhance a small seed dataset by augmenting additional data that can be used for fine-tuning on a specific task. LLM2LLM (1) fine-tunes a baseline student LLM on the initial seed data, (2) evaluates and extracts data points that the model gets wrong, and (3) uses a teacher LLM to generate synthetic data based on these incorrect data points, which are then added back into the training data. This approach amplifies the signal from incorrectly predicted data points by the LLM during training and reintegrates them into the dataset to focus on more challenging examples for the LLM. Our results show that LLM2LLM significantly enhances the performance of LLMs in the low-data regime, outperforming both traditional fine-tuning and other data augmentation baselines. LLM2LLM reduces the dependence on labor-intensive data curation and paves the way for more scalable and performant LLM solutions, allowing us to tackle data-constrained domains and tasks. We achieve improvements up to 24.2% on the GSM8K dataset, 32.6% on CaseHOLD, 32.0% on SNIPS, 52.6% on TREC and 39.8% on SST-2 over regular fine-tuning in the low-data regime using a Llama-2-7B student model. Our code is available at https://github.com/SqueezeAILab/LLM2LLM .