# MetaLadder: Ascending Mathematical Solution Quality via Analogical-Problem Reasoning Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14891 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14891/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Mathematical reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 21 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-Math Technical Report: Toward Mathematical Expert Model via Self-Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12122/) (2024)
- [MetaMath: Bootstrap Your Own Mathematical Questions for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12284/) (2023)
- [WizardMath: Empowering Mathematical Reasoning for Large Language Models via Reinforced Evol-Instruct](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09583/) (2023)
- [Search-o1: Agentic Search-Enhanced Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05366/) (2025)
- [Scaling Relationship on Learning Mathematical Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01825/) (2023)
- [Analysing Mathematical Reasoning Abilities of Neural Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01557/) (2019)
- [rStar-Math: Small LLMs Can Master Math Reasoning with Self-Evolved Deep Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04519/) (2025)
- [ReFT: Reasoning with Reinforced Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08967/) (2024)
- [Accessing GPT-4 level Mathematical Olympiad Solutions via Monte Carlo Tree Self-refine with LLaMa-3 8B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07394/) (2024)
- [MARIO: MAth Reasoning with code Interpreter Output -- A Reproducible Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08190/) (2024)
- [RAT: Retrieval Augmented Thoughts Elicit Context-Aware Reasoning in Long-Horizon Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05313/) (2024)
- [Augmenting Math Word Problems via Iterative Question Composing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09003/) (2024)
- [Reformatted Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12219/) (2024)
- [Enhancing LLM Intelligence with ARM-RAG: Auxiliary Rationale Memory for Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04177/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [MathFusion: Enhancing Mathematical Problem-solving of LLM through Instruction Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16212/) (2025)
- [OpenDataArena: A Fair and Open Arena for Benchmarking Post-Training Dataset Value](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14051/) (2025)
- [REST: Stress Testing Large Reasoning Models by Asking Multiple Problems at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10541/) (2025)
- [Scaling Code-Assisted Chain-of-Thoughts and Instructions for Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04081/) (2025)
- [ScaleDiff: Scaling Difficult Problems for Advanced Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21070/) (2025)
- [When Tokenization is Secretly Output Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01386/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in solving mathematical reasoning tasks, leveraging Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data as a vital component in guiding answer generation. Current paradigms typically generate CoT and answers directly for a given problem, diverging from human problem-solving strategies to some extent. Humans often solve problems by recalling analogous cases and leveraging their solutions to reason about the current task. Inspired by this cognitive process, we propose MetaLadder, a novel framework that explicitly prompts LLMs to recall and reflect on meta-problems, those structurally or semantically analogous problems, alongside their CoT solutions before addressing the target problem. Additionally, we introduce a problem-restating mechanism to enhance the model's comprehension of the target problem by regenerating the original question, which further improves reasoning accuracy. Therefore, the model can achieve reasoning transfer from analogical problems, mimicking human-like "learning from examples" and generalization abilities. Extensive experiments on mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that our MetaLadder significantly boosts LLMs' problem-solving accuracy, largely outperforming standard CoT-based methods (10.3% accuracy gain) and other methods. Our code and data has been released at https://github.com/LHL3341/MetaLadder.