ICLR2026
Scaling Generalist Data-Analytic Agents
Shuofei Qiao, Yanqiu Zhao, Zhisong Qiu, Xiaobin Wang, Jintian Zhang, Zhao Bin, Ningyu Zhang, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen
8 citations
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 or multi-agent scaffolds over proprietary models, while open-source models still struggle with 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 construct 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 list some empirical insights gained from our exploratory trials in the analysis experiments, aiming to provide actionable insights about agent training for the community. We have released DATAMIND-12K and DATAMIND-7B,14B for the community 1 .