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CHIMERA: Compact Synthetic Data for Generalizable LLM Reasoning

Xinyu Zhu, Yihao Feng, Yanchao Sun, Xianzhi Du, Pingzhi Li, Olli Saarikivi, Yun Zhu, Yu Meng · Mar 1, 2026 · Citations: 0

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Provisional trust

This page is a lightweight research summary built from the abstract and metadata while deeper extraction catches up.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Read the full paper before copying any benchmark, metric, or protocol choices.

Evidence quality

Provisional

Derived from abstract and metadata only.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities, largely enabled by supervised fine-tuning (SFT)- and reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training on high-quality reasoning data. However, reproducing and extending these capabilities in open and scalable settings is hindered by three fundamental data-centric challenges: (1) the cold-start problem, arising from the lack of seed datasets with detailed, long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories needed to initialize reasoning policies; (2) limited domain coverage, as most existing open-source reasoning datasets are concentrated in mathematics, with limited coverage of broader scientific disciplines; and (3) the annotation bottleneck, where the difficulty of frontier-level reasoning tasks makes reliable human annotation prohibitively expensive or infeasible. To address these challenges, we introduce CHIMERA, a compact synthetic reasoning dataset comprising 9K samples for generalizable cross-domain reasoning. CHIMERA is constructed with three key properties: (1) it provides rich, long CoT reasoning trajectories synthesized by state-of-the-art reasoning models; (2) it has broad and structured coverage, spanning 8 major scientific disciplines and over 1K fine-grained topics organized via a model-generated hierarchical taxonomy; and (3) it employs a fully automated, scalable evaluation pipeline that uses strong reasoning models to cross-validate both problem validity and answer correctness. We use CHIMERA to post-train a 4B Qwen3 model. Despite the dataset's modest size, the resulting model achieves strong performance on a suite of challenging reasoning benchmarks, including GPQA-Diamond, AIME 24/25/26, HMMT 25, and Humanity's Last Exam, approaching or matching the reasoning performance of substantially larger models such as DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen3-235B.

Abstract-only analysis — low confidence

All signals on this page are inferred from the abstract only and may be inaccurate. Do not use this page as a primary protocol reference.

  • This page is still relying on abstract and metadata signals, not a fuller protocol read.

Should You Rely On This Paper?

Signal extraction is still processing. This page currently shows metadata-first guidance until structured protocol fields are ready.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A provisional background reference while structured extraction finishes.

Main weakness

This page is still relying on abstract and metadata signals, not a fuller protocol read.

Trust level

Provisional

Usefulness score

Unavailable

Eval-fit score is unavailable until extraction completes.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Weak / implicit signal

Usefulness for eval research

Provisional (processing)

Extraction confidence 0%

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

provisional (inferred)

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities, largely enabled by supervised fine-tuning (SFT)- and reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training on high-quality reasoning data."

Evaluation Modes

provisional (inferred)

None explicit

Validate eval design from full paper text.

"Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities, largely enabled by supervised fine-tuning (SFT)- and reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training on high-quality reasoning data."

Quality Controls

provisional (inferred)

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities, largely enabled by supervised fine-tuning (SFT)- and reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training on high-quality reasoning data."

Benchmarks / Datasets

provisional (inferred)

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities, largely enabled by supervised fine-tuning (SFT)- and reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training on high-quality reasoning data."

Reported Metrics

provisional (inferred)

Not extracted

No metric anchors detected.

"Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities, largely enabled by supervised fine-tuning (SFT)- and reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training on high-quality reasoning data."

Rater Population

provisional (inferred)

Unknown

Rater source not explicitly reported.

"Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities, largely enabled by supervised fine-tuning (SFT)- and reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training on high-quality reasoning data."

Human Feedback Details

This page is using abstract-level cues only right now. Treat the signals below as provisional.

  • Potential human-data signal: No explicit human-data keywords detected.
  • Potential benchmark anchors: No benchmark names detected in abstract.
  • Abstract highlights: 3 key sentence(s) extracted below.

Evaluation Details

Evaluation fields are inferred from the abstract only.

  • Potential evaluation modes: No explicit eval keywords detected.
  • Potential metric signals: No metric keywords detected.
  • Confidence: Provisional (metadata-only fallback).

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities, largely enabled by supervised fine-tuning (SFT)- and reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training on high-quality reasoning data.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities, largely enabled by supervised fine-tuning (SFT)- and reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training on high-quality reasoning data.
  • However, reproducing and extending these capabilities in open and scalable settings is hindered by three fundamental data-centric challenges: (1) the cold-start problem, arising from the lack of seed datasets with detailed, long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories needed to initialize reasoning policies; (2) limited domain coverage, as most existing open-source reasoning datasets are concentrated in mathematics, with limited coverage of broader scientific disciplines; and (3) the annotation bottleneck, where the difficulty of frontier-level reasoning tasks makes reliable human annotation prohibitively expensive or infeasible.
  • To address these challenges, we introduce CHIMERA, a compact synthetic reasoning dataset comprising 9K samples for generalizable cross-domain reasoning.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

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