An Analysis of the Impact of Problem Paraphrasing on LLM-Based Mathematical Problem Solving

Yerim Han, Hyein Seo, Hyuk Namgoong, Sangkeun Jung


Abstract
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved mathematical problem-solving. Among various techniques, paraphrasing problem statements has emerged as a promising strategy to enhance model understanding and accuracy.We define twelve paraphrasing types grounded in mathematics education theory and analyze their impact on LLM performance across different configurations. To automate selection, we propose a Paraphrase Type Selector that predicts effective paraphrases for each problem.Experiments on MATH-500, SVAMP, and AIME shows consistent performance gain from paraphrased problems. On MATH-500 with LLaMA 3.1-8B, combining the original with the best five paraphrased problems improves accuracy by +8.4%, with the selector achieving an additional +1.33% gain.
Anthology ID:
2025.ijcnlp-long.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venues:
IJCNLP | AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
383–395
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.23/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yerim Han, Hyein Seo, Hyuk Namgoong, and Sangkeun Jung. 2025. An Analysis of the Impact of Problem Paraphrasing on LLM-Based Mathematical Problem Solving. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 383–395, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Analysis of the Impact of Problem Paraphrasing on LLM-Based Mathematical Problem Solving (Han et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.23.pdf