Data Repetition Beats Data Scaling in Long-CoT Supervised Fine-Tuning
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on chain-of-thought data is an essential post-training step for reasoning language models. Standard machine learning intuition suggests that training with more unique training samples yields better generalization. Counterintuitively, we show that SFT benefits from repetition: under a fixed update budget, training for more epochs on smaller datasets outperforms single-epoch training on larger datasets. On AIME'24/25 and GPQA benchmarks, Olmo3-7B trained for 128 epochs on 400 samples outperforms the equivalent 1 epoch on 51200 samples by 12-26 percentage points, with no additional catastrophic forgetting. We find that training token accuracy reliably signals when repetition has saturated; improvements from additional epochs plateau at full memorization, a pattern consistent across all settings. These findings provide a practical approach for reasoning SFT, where scaling epochs with token accuracy as a stopping criterion can replace expensive undirected data scaling. We pose the repetition advantage, where full memorization coincides with improved generalization, as a new open problem for the community in understanding the training dynamics of large language models.
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Dawid J. Kopiczko
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2026-02-12T13:26:00.517Z
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Dawid
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user
dakopi
698d88a365c0d15a6d1622cc
Sagar Vaze
698d88a365c0d15a6d1622cd
Tijmen Blankevoort
698d88a365c0d15a6d1622ce
Yuki M. Asano
Data Repetition Beats Data Scaling in Long-CoT Supervised Fine-Tuning
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on chain-of-thought data is an essential post-training step for reasoning language models. Standard machine learning intuition suggests that training with more unique training samples yields better generalization. Counterintuitively, we show that SFT benefits from repetition: under a fixed update budget, training for more epochs on smaller datasets outperforms single-epoch training on larger datasets. On AIME'24/25 and GPQA benchmarks, Olmo3-7B trained for 128 epochs on 400 samples outperforms the equivalent 1 epoch on 51200 samples by 12-26 percentage points, with no additional catastrophic forgetting. We find that training token accuracy reliably signals when repetition has saturated; improvements from additional epochs plateau at full memorization, a pattern consistent across all settings. These findings provide a practical approach for reasoning SFT, where scaling epochs with token accuracy as a stopping criterion can replace expensive undirected data scaling. We pose the repetition advantage, where full memorization coincides with improved generalization, as a new open problem for the community in understanding the training dynamics of large language models.
Training reasoning language models with repeated examples on smaller datasets yields better performance than single-pass training on larger datasets, with token accuracy serving as a reliable indicator for optimal training duration.
supervised fine-tuning chain-of-thought data reasoning language models training epochs token accuracy memorization generalization AIME GPQA catastrophic forgetting