Synthetic Data Generation for Language Models

This field studies how to create artificial text, examples, and interaction traces that teach language models new skills or provide evaluation data when human-authored examples are scarce. Common approaches include prompting teacher models, generating tasks from structured sources such as knowledge graphs and documents, building executable simulators, and using agents to create tool-use or reasoning trajectories. Filtering, symbolic or execution-based verification, and feedback from student-model performance are used to improve quality and tailor data to particular models, domains, and difficulty levels. A central tension is whether synthetic data can scale useful training without losing diversity, factual grounding, or resemblance to real human data; gains vary by task, and recursive generation can reinforce errors or cause collapse.