GRADS: Graph-Regulated Agentic Data Synthesis with Controllable Difficulty

arXiv:2610.21167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research agents are increasingly deployed to retrieve precise information from large corpora, yet multi-hop, long-horizon tasks remain challenging. Synthetic data generation has emerged as a scalable solution, with existing pipelines typically expanding seed tasks to increase their apparent depth and breadth. However, this expansion does not reliably translate into necessary reasoning: newly introduced evidence may be only weakly coupled to the answer, creating a mismatch between intended and empirical difficulty. To address this problem, we introduce GRADS, a graph-guided agentic data synthesis framework with explicit difficulty control. GRADS runs a closed loop of seed selection, evidence expansion, question--answer construction, and verification while maintaining a graph of the evidence and inference dependencies required to derive each answer. At each step, it conditions generation on a relevant subgraph, preserving indispensable inference without accumulating irrelevant context. Experiments across security, software-engineering, and scientific-document domains show that GRADS consistently generates verified tasks with empirically separated difficulty distributions, as measured by independent solvers. Moreover, under matched training budgets, post-training on this data delivers consistent gains at every level: SFT raises the solution-termination rate to over 95% while cutting tool calls and turns by up to 75%, RL trims tool use by up to a further 19.5%, and on our held-out, domain-specific benchmarks, the resulting 4B model matches Sonnet~4 on software engineering and surpasses it on the scientific and security domains.

Abstract:Deep research agents are increasingly deployed to retrieve precise information from large corpora, yet multi-hop, long-horizon tasks remain challenging. Synthetic data generation has emerged as a scalable solution, with existing pipelines typically expanding seed tasks to increase their apparent depth and breadth. However, this expansion does not reliably translate into necessary reasoning: newly introduced evidence may be only weakly coupled to the answer, creating a mismatch between intended and empirical difficulty. To address this problem, we introduce GRADS, a graph-guided agentic data synthesis framework with explicit difficulty control. GRADS runs a closed loop of seed selection, evidence expansion, question--answer construction, and verification while maintaining a graph of the evidence and inference dependencies required to derive each answer. At each step, it conditions generation on a relevant subgraph, preserving indispensable inference without accumulating irrelevant context. Experiments across security, software-engineering, and scientific-document domains show that GRADS consistently generates verified tasks with empirically separated difficulty distributions, as measured by independent solvers. Moreover, under matched training budgets, post-training on this data delivers consistent gains at every level: SFT raises the solution-termination rate to over 95% while cutting tool calls and turns by up to 75%, RL trims tool use by up to a further 19.5%, and on our held-out, domain-specific benchmarks, the resulting 4B model matches Sonnet~4 on software engineering and surpasses it on the scientific and security domains.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.21167 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2610.21167v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.21167 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

aiqbench analysis

GRADS: Graph-Regulated Agentic Data Synthesis with Controllable Difficulty

Related coverage