# AgentInstruct: Toward Generative Teaching with Agentic Flows

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03502 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03502/

## Key facts

- Cited by 89 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Educational agents and math problem solving, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 29 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Educational agents and math problem solving](https://mlsanity.com/agents/educational-agents-and-math-problem-solving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07911/) (2023)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00161/) (2019)
- [Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14233/) (2023)
- [MetaMath: Bootstrap Your Own Mathematical Questions for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12284/) (2023)
- [AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06364/) (2023)
- [Instruction Tuning with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03277/) (2023)
- [RLAIF vs. RLHF: Scaling Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00267/) (2023)
- [Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02707/) (2023)
- [The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17493/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13178/) (2024)
- [The False Promise of Imitating Proprietary LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15717/) (2023)
- [Camels in a Changing Climate: Enhancing LM Adaptation with Tulu 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10702/) (2023)
- [Direct Nash Optimization: Teaching Language Models to Self-Improve with General Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03715/) (2024)
- [Orca-Math: Unlocking the potential of SLMs in Grade School Math](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14830/) (2024)
- [ACI-BENCH: a Novel Ambient Clinical Intelligence Dataset for Benchmarking Automatic Visit Note Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02022/) (2023)
- [EQ-Bench: An Emotional Intelligence Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06281/) (2023)
- [FOFO: A Benchmark to Evaluate LLMs' Format-Following Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18667/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Generation and Evaluation Capabilities of Large Language Models for Instruction Controllable Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09184/) (2023)
- [XtremeDistil: Multi-stage Distillation for Massive Multilingual Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05686/) (2020)
- [Autonomous Data Selection with Zero-shot Generative Classifiers for Mathematical Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07625/) (2024)
- [Unearthing Large Scale Domain-Specific Knowledge from Public Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14624/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 89)

- [Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20534/) (2025)
- [Multi-Agent Collaboration Mechanisms: A Survey of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06322/) (2025)
- [ToolACE: Winning the Points of LLM Function Calling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00920/) (2024)
- [Phi-4-reasoning Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21318/) (2025)
- [From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19678/) (2025)
- [Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Interactive LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01600/) (2025)
- [Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11357/) (2025)
- [Distilling LLM Agent into Small Models with Retrieval and Code Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17612/) (2025)
- [On Data Engineering for Scaling LLM Terminal Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21193/) (2026)
- [Unveiling the Secret Recipe: A Guide For Supervised Fine-Tuning Small LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13337/) (2024)
- [SkillGen: Verified Inference-Time Agent Skill Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10999/) (2026)
- [Fara-7B: An Efficient Agentic Model for Computer Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19663/) (2025)
- [Tool-R0: Self-Evolving LLM Agents for Tool-Learning from Zero Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21320/) (2026)
- [InSTA: Towards Internet-Scale Training For Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06776/) (2025)
- [MUA-RL: Multi-turn User-interacting Agent Reinforcement Learning for agentic tool use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18669/) (2025)
- [Self-Improving LLM Agents at Test-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07841/) (2025)
- [TermiGen: High-Fidelity Environment and Robust Trajectory Synthesis for Terminal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07274/) (2026)
- [AgentSentinel: An End-to-End and Real-Time Security Defense Framework for Computer-Use Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07764/) (2025)
- [Gym-Anything: Turn any Software into an Agent Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06126/) (2026)
- [DARS: Dynamic Action Re-Sampling to Enhance Coding Agent Performance by Adaptive Tree Traversal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14269/) (2025)
- [A Modular Approach for Clinical SLMs Driven by Synthetic Data with Pre-Instruction Tuning, Model Merging, and Clinical-Tasks Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10717/) (2025)
- [Automated test generation to evaluate tool-augmented LLMs as conversational AI agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15934/) (2024)
- [Agent Data Protocol: Unifying Datasets for Diverse, Effective Fine-tuning of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24702/) (2025)
- [LoopTool: Closing the Data-Training Loop for Robust LLM Tool Calls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09148/) (2025)
- [Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25996/) (2026)
- [CRAFT Your Dataset: Task-Specific Synthetic Dataset Generation Through Corpus Retrieval and Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02098/) (2024)
- [Krikri: Advancing Open Large Language Models for Greek](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13772/) (2025)
- [SynthAgent: Adapting Web Agents with Synthetic Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06101/) (2025)
- [HunyuanOCR-1.5: Making Lightweight OCR VLMs Faster and Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04884/) (2026)
- [TapeAgents: a Holistic Framework for Agent Development and Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08445/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Synthetic data is becoming increasingly important for accelerating the development of language models, both large and small. Despite several successful use cases, researchers also raised concerns around model collapse and drawbacks of imitating other models. This discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that synthetic data varies in quality and diversity. Effective use of synthetic data usually requires significant human effort in curating the data. We focus on using synthetic data for post-training, specifically creating data by powerful models to teach a new skill or behavior to another model, we refer to this setting as Generative Teaching. We introduce AgentInstruct, an extensible agentic framework for automatically creating large amounts of diverse and high-quality synthetic data. AgentInstruct can create both the prompts and responses, using only raw data sources like text documents and code files as seeds. We demonstrate the utility of AgentInstruct by creating a post training dataset of 25M pairs to teach language models different skills, such as text editing, creative writing, tool usage, coding, reading comprehension, etc. The dataset can be used for instruction tuning of any base model. We post-train Mistral-7b with the data. When comparing the resulting model Orca-3 to Mistral-7b-Instruct (which uses the same base model), we observe significant improvements across many benchmarks. For example, 40% improvement on AGIEval, 19% improvement on MMLU, 54% improvement on GSM8K, 38% improvement on BBH and 45% improvement on AlpacaEval. Additionally, it consistently outperforms other models such as LLAMA-8B-instruct and GPT-3.5-turbo.