# PARAMANU-GANITA: Can Small Math Language Models Rival with Large Language Models on Mathematical Reasoning?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14395 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14395/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Mathematical reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 24 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Mathematical reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/mathematical-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

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- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
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- [WizardMath: Empowering Mathematical Reasoning for Large Language Models via Reinforced Evol-Instruct](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09583/) (2023)
- [The Falcon Series of Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16867/) (2023)
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- [Llemma: An Open Language Model For Mathematics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10631/) (2023)
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- [MathPile: A Billion-Token-Scale Pretraining Corpus for Math](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17120/) (2023)
- [Making Large Language Models Better Reasoners with Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02144/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we study whether domain specific pretraining of small generative language models (SLM) from scratch with domain specialized tokenizer and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) instruction fine-tuning results in competitive performance on mathematical reasoning compared to LLMs? Secondly, whether this approach is environmentally sustainable, highly cost efficient? To address these research questions, we present Paramanu-Ganita, a 208 million-parameter novel decoder-only Auto Regressive SLM on mathematics. We performed pretraining from scratch on 31.5 billion tokens for 170 A100 hours using a context size of 4096 on a mixed mathematical corpus consisting of web pages, source code, textbooks, CoT templatised StackOverflow QA pairs, and mathematical lecture notes in LaTeX curated by us. We also trained a math and code specialised BPE tokenizer. We proposed and performed CoT instruction fine-tuning of Paramanu-Ganita on the MetaMathQA dataset. Our model Paramanu-Ganita, despite being 34 times smaller than the 7B LLMs, outperforms generalist LLMs by approximately 30% points, and even math-specialised LLMs by 3-23% points in GSM8K test accuracy metric. On MATH benchmark, Paramanu-Ganita outperformed the various models by 6-8% points. On benchmarks like LogiQA, MMLU (high school, college level), and competitive exams level, AGIEVAL (AQuA-RAT, SAT-Math), Paramanu-Ganita outperformed others by 1-4%. Our model is available at https://huggingface.co/gyanai/paramanu-ganita-208M-hf .