An Analysis of the Impact of Problem Paraphrasing on LLM-Based Mathematical Problem Solving

AbstractRecent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved mathematical problem-solving. Among various techniques, paraphrasing problem statements has emerged as a promising strategy to enhance model understanding and accuracy.We define twelve paraphrasing types grounded in mathematics education theory and analyze their impact on LLM performance across different configurations. To automate selection, we propose a Paraphrase Type Selector that predicts effective paraphrases for each problem.Experiments on MATH-500, SVAMP, and AIME shows consistent performance gain from paraphrased problems. On MATH-500 with LLaMA 3.1-8B, combining the original with the best five paraphrased problems improves accuracy by +8.4%, with the selector achieving an additional +1.33% gain.