Self-Foveate: Enhancing Diversity and Difficulty of Synthesized Instructions from Unsupervised Text via Multi-Level Foveation

Mingzhe Li, Xin Lu, Yanyan Zhao


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) with instruction following capabilities have demonstrated impressive problem-solving abilities. While synthesizing instructional data from unsupervised text has become a common approach for training such models, conventional methods rely heavily on human effort for data annotation. Although existing automated synthesis paradigms have alleviated this constraint, they still exhibit significant limitations in ensuring adequate diversity and difficulty of synthesized instructions. To address these challenges, we propose Self-Foveate, an innovative LLM-driven method for instruction synthesis. This approach introduces a “Micro-Scatter-Macro” multi-level foveation methodology that effectively guides the LLM to deeply excavate fine-grained information embedded in unsupervised text, thereby enhancing both the diversity and difficulty of synthesized instructions. Comprehensive experiments across multiple unsupervised corpora and diverse model architectures validate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method. We publicly release our data and codes: https://github.com/Mubuky/Self-Foveate
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.380
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
7274–7289
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.380/
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Cite (ACL):
Mingzhe Li, Xin Lu, and Yanyan Zhao. 2025. Self-Foveate: Enhancing Diversity and Difficulty of Synthesized Instructions from Unsupervised Text via Multi-Level Foveation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 7274–7289, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Self-Foveate: Enhancing Diversity and Difficulty of Synthesized Instructions from Unsupervised Text via Multi-Level Foveation (Li et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.380.pdf