# ReGenesis: LLMs can Grow into Reasoning Generalists via Self-Improvement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02108 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02108/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 34 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Test-time compute and efficient thinking](https://mlsanity.com/lr/test-time-compute-and-efficient-thinking/)
- Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs / [Synthetic reasoning data and bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/synth/synthetic-reasoning-data-and-bootstrapping/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [STaR: Bootstrapping Reasoning With Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14465/) (2022)
- [Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08935/) (2023)
- [Are NLP Models really able to Solve Simple Math Word Problems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07191/) (2021)
- [CRITIC: Large Language Models Can Self-Correct with Tool-Interactive Critiquing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11738/) (2023)
- [Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02235/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Can Self-Improve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11610/) (2022)
- [Program Induction by Rationale Generation : Learning to Solve and Explain Algebraic Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04146/) (2017)
- [WizardMath: Empowering Mathematical Reasoning for Large Language Models via Reinforced Evol-Instruct](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09583/) (2023)
- [Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02707/) (2023)
- [A Diverse Corpus for Evaluating and Developing English Math Word Problem Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15772/) (2021)
- [Principle-Driven Self-Alignment of Language Models from Scratch with Minimal Human Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03047/) (2023)
- [ReClor: A Reading Comprehension Dataset Requiring Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04326/) (2020)
- [Advancing LLM Reasoning Generalists with Preference Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02078/) (2024)
- [Recursive Introspection: Teaching Language Model Agents How to Self-Improve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18219/) (2024)
- [Take a Step Back: Evoking Reasoning via Abstraction in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06117/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08446/) (2025)
- [SiriuS: Self-improving Multi-agent Systems via Bootstrapped Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04780/) (2025)
- [Self-Improving Transformers Overcome Easy-to-Hard and Length Generalization Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01612/) (2025)
- [Learning to Reason via Mixture-of-Thought for Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15817/) (2025)
- [Aurelia: Test-time Reasoning Distillation in Audio-Visual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23219/) (2025)
- [Diversity-Enhanced Reasoning for Subjective Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20187/) (2025)
- [Revisiting LLMs as Zero-Shot Time-Series Forecasters: Small Noise Can Break Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00457/) (2025)
- [AdaSTaR: Adaptive Data Sampling for Training Self-Taught Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16322/) (2025)
- [RuleReasoner: Reinforced Rule-based Reasoning via Domain-aware Dynamic Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08672/) (2025)
- [Theoretical Modeling of Large Language Model Self-Improvement Training Dynamics Through Solver-Verifier Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00075/) (2025)
- [A Theory of Inference Compute Scaling: Reasoning through Directed Stochastic Skill Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00004/) (2025)
- [Self-Improving Model Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08967/) (2025)
- [Limited Reasoning Space: The cage of long-horizon reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19281/) (2026)
- [Not the Example, but the Process: How Self-Generated Examples Enhance LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15863/) (2026)
- [Scaling LLM Reasoning from Minimal Labels: A Semi-Supervised Framework with a Lightweight Verifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16811/) (2026)
- [Understanding Curriculum Learning in Large Language Models via Cross-Difficulty Optimization Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17268/) (2026)
- [Learning from the Gap Between Pass@K and Pass@1](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35793/) (2026)
- [Mapping the RAG Landscape: A Four Axis Taxonomy of Efficiency, Defense, Interactivity, and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01936/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) with explicit reasoning trajectories can enhance their reasoning abilities. However, acquiring such high-quality trajectory data typically demands meticulous supervision from humans or superior models, which can be either expensive or license-constrained. In this paper, we explore how far an LLM can improve its reasoning by self-synthesizing reasoning paths as training data without any additional supervision. Existing self-synthesizing methods, such as STaR, suffer from poor generalization to out-of-domain (OOD) reasoning tasks. We hypothesize it is due to that their self-synthesized reasoning paths are too task-specific, lacking general task-agnostic reasoning guidance. To address this, we propose Reasoning Generalist via Self-Improvement (ReGenesis), a method to self-synthesize reasoning paths as post-training data by progressing from abstract to concrete. More specifically, ReGenesis self-synthesizes reasoning paths by converting general reasoning guidelines into task-specific ones, generating reasoning structures, and subsequently transforming these structures into reasoning paths, without the need for human-designed task-specific examples used in existing methods. We show that ReGenesis achieves superior performance on all in-domain and OOD settings tested compared to existing methods. For six OOD tasks specifically, while previous methods exhibited an average performance decrease of approximately 4.6% after post training, ReGenesis delivers around 6.1% performance improvement. We also conduct in-depth analysis of our framework and show ReGenesis is effective across various LLMs and design choices.