ADE: Agentic Data Evolution Framework for Human-Centered Objectives
Authors: Yang Yu, Yilin Jiang, Zexuan Fei, Yiming Luo, Xingkai Song, Kaiyi Huang, Aimin Zhou, Xin Lin, Fei Tan
Organizations: East China Normal University, Shanghai, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China · Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai, China
Aligning large language models to human-centered objectives is difficult when targets are non-executable and context-dependent, limiting reliable verification and scalable supervision. Although synthetic data expands coverage, weak verification shifts the bottleneck from generation to selection. Noisy signals destabilize iterative refinement and can cause silent regressions. We propose Agentic Data Evolution (ADE), a data-centric framework that organizes synthetic supervision as evolving data snapshots. ADE improves data snapshots through a closed-loop Observation-Variation-Selection (OVS) procedure, where a steady-state admission mechanism acts as a quality ratchet that conservatively gates updates for sustained cross-round improvement. We validate these improvements through complementary intrinsic trend tracking and extrinsic post-training evaluation. On DEV300, ADE raises the intrinsic win rate from 50% to 75.81% and the extrinsic win rate from 55.20% to 68.86%, consistent performance gains across diverse benchmarks. Blind expert evaluation further confirms this, with a 66.11% preference for evolved answers. These gains extend across post-training methods, model scales, and tasks beyond the target weakly verifiable educational objectives. Resources are available at https://github.com/ZeroLoss-Lab/Agentic-Data-Evolution.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of Agentic Data Evolution (ADE). ADE can be decomposed into three stages: (A) Construct D(0) by concept–scenario–topic pipeline. (B) Evolve data D(t) with Observation–Variation–Selection to obtain D(t+1) . (C) Validate data quality with intrinsic validation, extrinsic validation, and human-calibrated validation.
Method
DEV300
Edu-Values
EduBench
Overall
VO
AS
CI
Philo.
Literacy
Basic
Skills
Ethics
VO
AS
CI
Target model
55.20
58.10
56.00
51.00
67.05
71.51
57.14
72.48
60.61
7.26
6.85
6.85
Single-Round Methods
Best-of- N (BoN)
58.03
66.25
66.25
47.42
65.52
70.97
56.19
70.72
64.07
7.87
6.91
7.04
SDFT
49.72
51.50
51.83
45.83
64.75
72.58
54.76
69.61
55.84
7.57
6.58
6.71
Self-Refine
65.82
71.75
73.42
52.58
61.30
67.74
50.95
63.66
54.55
6.71
6.94
6.71
Table 1: Extrinsic validation results on three benchmarks. For each column, the best result is shown in bold and the second best is underlined . VO (value orientation), AS (affective support), and CI (creative innovation). Philo. (professional philosophy), Literacy (cultural literacy), Basic (basic competencies), Skills (educational knowledge and skills), and Ethics (teachers’ professional ethics).
Metric
Annotator
Score
Win rate (%)
Expert 1
65.56
Expert 2
63.33
Expert 3
66.67
Majority vote
66.11
Fleiss’s κ
Human–Human
0.7751
Cohen’s κ
Human–Judge
0.7149
Table 2: Human-calibrated validation on D(4) vs. D(0) over DEV300, with inter-annotator (Fleiss’s κ ) and human–judge (Cohen’s κ ) agreement.
Model
Cohen’s κ
Win Rate (%)
DeepSeek-V3.2
0.7149
67.22
GLM-5
0.5762
63.89
Kimi-K2.5
0.2645
76.67
Table 3: Automatic judge selection on DEV300.
Figure 2: Intrinsic validation on DEV300. Curves report pairwise preference win rates against D(0) , shown overall and by routed objective across evolution rounds.
Figure 3: Extrinsic validation on DEV300. Bars report pairwise preference win rates for models post-trained on selected snapshots, shown overall and by routed objective.
Dataset
Metric
D(0)
D(4)
Δ
MATH-500
Accuracy (%)
54.60
55.80
+1.20
ToxiCN
F1 (%)
74.14
75.32
+1.18
Table 4: Out-of-domain verifiable tasks comparing the target model post-trained on D(0) and D(4) .
Figure 4: Transferability across post-training methods. Extrinsic validation on DEV300 comparing models post-trained with SFT vs. RL on ADE-evolved snapshots. Curves report generalized win rates for models, compared with the D(0) -trained reference.
Figure 5: Scale transferability at 72B. We compare models post-trained on snapshot D(4) (denoted Round 4) against D(0) (denoted Round 0). Bars report 100% stacked win rates on DEV300 across four views.
Configuration
R
Overall
VO
AS
CI
ADE
1
75.06
82.08
80.33
62.75
2
75.22
83.50
80.92
61.25
3
76.56
84.08
82.42
63.17
4
75.81
82.42
83.08
61.92
w/o critics dims
1
53.92
54.00
54.83
52.92
2
58.94
60.25
57.83
58.75
Table 5: Ablation studies across evolution rounds. We report win rates (%) for the overall score and three dimensions. Cell background colors indicate performance drops relative to ADE at the same round, with darker red denoting larger degradations. R is short for Round.
Appendix figures & tables3 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Attribute
Choices
activity_domain
Classroom Learning, Homework and Self Study, Exams and Assessment, Class Meetings and Character Education, Peer Interaction, Home School Communication, Online Spaces, Clubs and Projects
grade_band
Elementary School, Middle School, High School
task_type
Guided Discussion and Reflection, Case Based Analysis, Action Planning, Role Play, Project Design, Writing and Expression, Peer Collaboration, Classroom Facilitation and Guidance
artifact
In Class Discussion Questions, Reflection Log, Study Strategy Card, Class Meeting Plan, Communication Script, Project Brief, Peer Agreement, Writing Outline
role_view
student, teacher, parent, peer, no_asker
question_type
Decision Making, Process Focused, Evidence Seeking, Reflective, Perspective Taking
Appendix
Table 6: Structured control attributes.
Dimension
Cues
Value Orientation
Theme cues: Moral character, Rule of law literacy, Cultural literacy, Family values, Civic and national identity. Concept cues: Honesty and trustworthiness, Fairness, Privacy protection, Copyright and citation, Respect for diversity, Intergenerational communication, Boundaries of online speech.
Affective Support
Exam anxiety, Regulation of physiological arousal, Breathing and mindfulness, Attention management, Phone distraction, Procrastination, Action initiation, Self-efficacy, Emotion identification and labeling, Resilience after setbacks, Stress coping, Sleep and daily routines, Social anxiety, Interpersonal boundaries, Peer pressure, Self-talk.
Creative Innovation
Action cues: Break through, Reframe, Reexamine, Challenge, Integrate, Reason through. Domain cues: Social rule design, Nonlinear narrative, AI ethics, Entropy reduction. Goal cues: Interdisciplinary transfer and integration, Counterintuitive innovative problem solving, Sensitivity to technology ethics.
Appendix
Table 7: Dimension-constrained concept cues.
Method
Overall
Value Orientation
Affective Support
Creative Innovation
SFT
68.86
76.75
73.92
55.92
DPO
69.94
79.08
75.75
55.00
PPO
74.33
80.92
77.44
64.67
GRPO
80.91
86.33
82.00
74.33
Appendix
Table 8: Win rates (%) of different reinforcement learning strategies built upon the SFT baseline across three evaluation dimensions: value orientation , affective support , and creative innovation .
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