Math-LLMs: AI Cyberinfrastructure with Pre-trained Transformers for Math Education

In recent years, the pre-training of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the educational domain has garnered significant attention. However, a discernible gap exists in the application of these models to mathematics education. This study aims to bridge this gap by pre-training LLMs on authentic K-12 mathematical dialogue datasets. Our research is structured around three primary research questions (RQs) that investigate the impact of fine-tuning data size and pre-training in downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, and the efficacy of LLMs in text generation tasks within the mathematical context. Our findings indicate that data size plays a pivotal role in the performance of LLMs in downstream NLP tasks, with larger datasets yielding more consistent and improved results. Furthermore, pre-trained models consistently outperformed their non-pre-trained counterparts, emphasizing the importance of leveraging prior knowledge in LLMs. In the realm of text generation, we found that our model can not only enhance mathematical understanding and performance on downstream math tasks but also generate more engaging and human-like language.