English

Scaling Generalist Data-Analytic Agents

Computation and Language 2026-03-16 v3 Artificial Intelligence Information Retrieval Machine Learning

Abstract

Data-analytic agents are emerging as a key catalyst for automated scientific discovery and for the vision of Innovating AI. Current approaches, however, rely heavily on prompt engineering over proprietary models, while open-source models struggle to face diverse-format, large-scale data files and long-horizon, multi-step reasoning that real-world analytics demands. This paper introduces DataMind, a scalable data synthesis and agent training recipe designed to build generalist data-analytic agents. DataMind tackles three key challenges in building open-source data-analytic agents, including insufficient data resources, improper training strategy, and unstable code-based multi-turn rollout. Concretely, DataMind applies 1) a fine-grained task taxonomy and a recursive easy-to-hard task composition mechanism to increase the diversity and difficulty of synthesized queries; 2) a knowledge-augmented trajectory sampling strategy followed by model-based and rule-based filtering; 3) a dynamically adjustable training objective combining both SFT and RL losses; 4) a memory-frugal and stable code-based multi-turn rollout framework. Built on DataMind, we curate DataMind-12K, a high-quality trajectory set spanning diverse domains, task categories, and data file formats for data-analytic tasks. Trained on DataMind-12K, our DataMind-14B achieves state-of-the-art with an average score of 71.16% on multiple data analysis benchmarks, outperforming the strongest proprietary baselines DeepSeek-V3.1 and GPT-5. Our DataMind-7B also performs best among all open-source models with a score of 68.10%. We also incorporate some empirical insights gained from our exploratory trials into the analysis experiments, aiming to provide actionable insights about agentic training for the community. We will release DataMind-12K and DataMind-7B,14B for the community's future research.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.25084,
  title  = {Scaling Generalist Data-Analytic Agents},
  author = {Shuofei Qiao and Yanqiu Zhao and Zhisong Qiu and Xiaobin Wang and Jintian Zhang and Zhao Bin and Ningyu Zhang and Yong Jiang and Pengjun Xie and Fei Huang and Huajun Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.25084},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

ICLR 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:05:14.802Z