# Balancing Synthetic Data and Replay for Enhancing Task-Specific Capabilities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11842 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11842/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Self-rewarding alignment and self-training, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs.
- Builds on 16 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs / [Self-rewarding alignment and self-training](https://mlsanity.com/synth/self-rewarding-alignment-and-self-training/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [MathQA: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Operation-Based Formalisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13319/) (2019)
- [An Empirical Study of Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models During Continual Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08747/) (2023)
- [Towards AI-Complete Question Answering: A Set of Prerequisite Toy Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.05698/) (2015)
- [Fine-tuned Language Models are Continual Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12393/) (2022)
- [Simple and Scalable Strategies to Continually Pre-train Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08763/) (2024)
- [Synthetic continued pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07431/) (2024)
- [On the Diversity of Synthetic Data and its Impact on Training Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15226/) (2024)
- [MuggleMath: Assessing the Impact of Query and Response Augmentation on Math Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05506/) (2023)
- [Synthesize-on-Graph: Knowledgeable Synthetic Data Generation for Continue Pre-training of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00979/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Adapting language models to new tasks through continued pretraining faces a fundamental trade-off: models must learn new capabilities while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of existing knowledge. While prior work has studied synthetic data generation techniques, the optimal replay ratios for balancing task performance and knowledge retention under computational constraints remain poorly understood. We present a comprehensive empirical study investigating the interplay between replay ratio configuration and computational budget when adapting language models to new tasks. Using the bAbI reasoning tasks as our target objective, we apply synthetic data generation and systematically evaluate different total token budgets and replay ratio configurations. We analyze their effects on both task mastery and general knowledge retention. Our experiments reveal an optimal configuration that balances task-specific performance with general knowledge retention. Based on our findings, we provide empirically-grounded guidelines for selecting replay ratios based on computational budget, enabling practitioners to achieve strong task adaptation with significantly reduced training costs.