Paper Detail

Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data

Ilia Kulikov, Chenxi Whitehouse, Tianhao Wu, Yixin Nie, Swarnadeep Saha, Eryk Helenowski, Weizhe Yuan, Olga Golovneva, Jack Lanchantin, Yoram Bachrach, Jakob Foerster, Xian Li, Han Fang, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Jason Weston

arxiv Score 14.2

Published 2026-06-24 · First seen 2026-06-25

General AI

Abstract

We introduce Autodata, a general method that enables AI agents to act as data scientists who build high quality training and evaluation data. We show how to train (meta-optimize) such a data scientist agent, so that it learns to create even stronger data. We describe the overall formulation, and a specific practical implementation, Agentic Self-Instruct. We conduct experiments on computer science research tasks, legal reasoning tasks and reasoning with mathematical objects, where we obtain improved results compared to classical synthetic dataset creation methods. Further, meta-optimizing the data scientist agent itself delivers an even larger performance uplift. Agentic data creation provides a way to convert increased inference compute into higher quality model training. Overall, we believe this direction has the potential to change the way we build AI data.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
now
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{kulikov2026autodata,
  title = {Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data},
  author = {Ilia Kulikov and Chenxi Whitehouse and Tianhao Wu and Yixin Nie and Swarnadeep Saha and Eryk Helenowski and Weizhe Yuan and Olga Golovneva and Jack Lanchantin and Yoram Bachrach and Jakob Foerster and Xian Li and Han Fang and Sainbayar Sukhbaatar and Jason Weston},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {We introduce Autodata, a general method that enables AI agents to act as data scientists who build high quality training and evaluation data. We show how to train (meta-optimize) such a data scientist agent, so that it learns to create even stronger data. We describe the overall formulation, and a specific practical implementation, Agentic Self-Instruct. We conduct experiments on computer science research tasks, legal reasoning tasks and reasoning with mathematical objects, where we obtain impro},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25996},
  keywords = {cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG, data scientist agent, meta-optimization, agentic self-instruct, synthetic dataset creation, inference compute, model training, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2606.25996},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}