ArithmeticGPT: empowering small-size large language models with advanced arithmetic skills

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating language across a wide range of domains. However, their performance in advanced arithmetic calculation remains a significant challenge, especially for small-size LLMs. Therefore, in this paper, we propose ArithmeticGPT, a practical framework designed to enhance the advanced arithmetic skills for small-size LLMs. We carefully curate an arithmetic instruction dataset, ArithInstruct, that is able to teach the small-size LLMs to trigger a self-developed internal calculation API for precise computations without explicit instructions. The advanced arithmetic calculation results are seamlessly generated within natural language sentences. Furthermore, we empirically design a practical three-stage strategy for fine-tuning the small-size LLMs with ArithInstruct to enable the advanced arithmetic skills and keep the models' original abilities such as commonsense reasoning and question answering. We evaluate ArithmeticGPT on six public math related datasets with 17 state-of-the-art LLM baselines and experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach. To encourage reproducible research, we make our data and code publicly available at https://github.com/ai4ed/ArithmeticGPT.