# FRIDA to the Rescue! Analyzing Synthetic Data Effectiveness in Object-Based Common Sense Reasoning for Disaster Response

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18452 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18452/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 13 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)
- 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, 13 of 13)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [TinyStories: How Small Can Language Models Be and Still Speak Coherent English?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07759/) (2023)
- [Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20094/) (2024)
- [Self-Consuming Generative Models Go MAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01850/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Robotic Language Grounding: Tradeoffs between Symbols and Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13245/) (2024)
- [SemScore: Automated Evaluation of Instruction-Tuned LLMs based on Semantic Textual Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17072/) (2024)
- [Human-Robot Dialogue Annotation for Multi-Modal Common Ground](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12829/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

During Human Robot Interactions in disaster relief scenarios, Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential for substantial physical reasoning to assist in mission objectives. However, these reasoning capabilities are often found only in larger models, which are not currently reasonable to deploy on robotic systems due to size constraints. To meet our problem space requirements, we introduce a dataset and pipeline to create Field Reasoning and Instruction Decoding Agent (FRIDA) models. In our pipeline, domain experts and linguists combine their knowledge to make high-quality, few-shot prompts used to generate synthetic data for fine-tuning. We hand-curate datasets for this few-shot prompting and for evaluation to improve LLM reasoning on both general and disaster-specific objects. We concurrently run an ablation study to understand which kinds of synthetic data most affect performance. We fine-tune several small instruction-tuned models and find that ablated FRIDA models only trained on objects' physical state and function data outperformed both the FRIDA models trained on all synthetic data and the base models in our evaluation. We demonstrate that the FRIDA pipeline is capable of instilling physical common sense with minimal data.