DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models
Zhihong ShaoPeiyi WangQihao ZhuRunxin XuJun-Mei SongMingchuan ZhangY. K. LiYu WuDaya Guo
Introduces DeepSeekMath 7B and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), demonstrating that an open 7B-parameter model can approach closed frontier performance on the competition-level MATH benchmark through large-scale pre-training and memory-efficient reinforcement learning.
Researchers at DeepSeek-AI developed DeepSeekMath 7B to close the performance gap between open and closed language models on mathematical reasoning tasks. The work addresses the fact that leading systems such as GPT-4 and Gemini-Ultra remain unavailable while existing open models lag well behind on competition-level benchmarks. The authors created a 120-billion-token mathematics corpus from Common Crawl through an iterative fastText classifier trained on high-quality seeds and refined with human annotation. They continued pre-training DeepSeek-Coder-Base-v1.5 7B on this corpus plus code and natural-language data, applied targeted instruction tuning, and then introduced Group Relative Policy Optimization, a memory-efficient reinforcement-learning variant that eliminates the separate value model used in standard Proximal Policy Optimization.
The resulting DeepSeekMath-Base 7B already matched or exceeded Minerva 540B on GSM8K and MATH while using roughly one-eightieth the parameters. After instruction tuning and GRPO, the final model reached 51.7 percent on MATH without tools or voting and 60.9 percent with self-consistency over 64 samples, surpassing all prior open 7B-to-70B models and most proprietary systems. Code pre-training before mathematics data improved both tool-using and tool-free reasoning, whereas arXiv papers produced negligible gains. GRPO delivered consistent lifts on both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks while cutting memory requirements, and the gains appear to come from sharpening the output distribution rather than expanding core capabilities.
These results show that publicly available web data, when filtered rigorously, can support frontier-level mathematical performance at modest scale, and that simplified reinforcement learning can further improve already strong instruction-tuned models without additional labeled data. Organizations seeking reliable quantitative reasoning therefore have a practical path to deploy capable open models rather than relying solely on closed APIs.
Further progress will require stronger process-level reward models, sampling strategies that move beyond nucleus sampling, and explicit handling of noisy reward signals. The authors also note that geometry and formal-proof performance remain weaker than closed models and that few-shot gains are limited by current scale. Continued refinement of the data pipeline and exploration of robust weak-to-strong alignment methods are the most direct next steps supported by the evidence.
- Paper: Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models, Jason Wei et al. (2022). Reading this foundational introduction to chain-of-thought prompting is essential because the source paper builds directly upon step-by-step reasoning mechanisms to enhance mathematical problem-solving.
- Paper: Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset, Dan Hendrycks et al. (2021). Familiarity with this competition-level math benchmark is required to understand the primary evaluation domain addressed by the source paper.
- Paper: Let's Verify Step by Step, Hunter Lightman et al. (2023). This paper's exploration of reward modeling and verification steps provides vital context for understanding the reinforcement learning techniques evaluated in the source.
- Paper: DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning, DeepSeek-AI et al. (2025). This work directly continues the source's exploration of reinforcement learning by detailing the complete DeepSeek-R1 training pipeline and emergent reasoning behaviors.
- Paper: Harder Is Better: Boosting Mathematical Reasoning via Difficulty-Aware GRPO and Multi-Aspect Question Reformulation, Yanqi Dai et al. (2026). This follow-up research extends the Group Relative Policy Optimization method introduced in the source by adding difficulty-aware weighting to boost mathematical reasoning further.
- Paper: Efficient Reasoning on the Edge, Yelysei Bondarenko et al. (2026). This study extends the principles of the source model by adapting its capabilities into an efficient framework tailored for resource-constrained edge devices.
