The DeepSeekMath paper introduces a 7B parameter open language model designed to enhance mathematical reasoning capabilities. The model is created by continuing the pre-training of DeepSeek-Coder-Base-v1.5 with 120B math-related tokens from Common Crawl, alongside natural language and code data.

  • DeepSeekMath 7B scores 51.7% on the competition-level MATH benchmark without external toolkits or voting techniques.
  • Self-consistency over 64 samples reaches 60.9% on the MATH benchmark.
  • The performance is attributed to a curated data selection pipeline and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO).
  • GRPO is a variant of Proximal Policy Optimization that improves reasoning while optimizing memory usage.

The authors consider this significant because the model approaches the performance level of proprietary models like Gemini-Ultra and GPT-4.