DAGGER: Distractor-Aware Graph Generation for Executable Reasoning in Math Problems

Zabir Al Nazi1, Shubhashis Roy Dipta2, Sudipta Kar3
1University of California, Riverside 2University of Maryland, Baltimore County 3Oracle Health AI

đŸ”Ĩ Accepted at EMNLP 2026 (Findings) đŸ”Ĩ
arXiv Code 🤗 Models DistractMath-BN Training Data

Key Results

89%
Fewer Tokens vs. Reasoning Models
69.4%
Weighted Avg. Accuracy
12-14
pts Drop (vs. up to 41 for CoT)
3,685
Distractor-Augmented Problems
DAGGER Overview: Instead of Chain-of-Thought reasoning, DAGGER generates executable computational graphs with explicit distractor node modeling.

Overview: DAGGER reformulates math word problems as executable computational graphs. Each node represents an operation or value, with explicit distractor: true/false annotations to identify irrelevant information.

Abstract

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely adopted for mathematical problem solving, including in low-resource languages, yet its behavior under irrelevant context remains underexplored. We introduce DistractMath-BN, a Bangla benchmark that augments MGSM and MSVAMP with semantically coherent but computationally irrelevant information.

Evaluating seven models (3B-12B parameters), we observe substantial performance degradation under distractors: standard models drop up to 41 points, while reasoning-specialized models decline 14-20 points despite consuming 5x more tokens.

We propose DAGGER (Distractor-Aware Graph Generation for Executable Reasoning), which reformulates mathematical problem solving as executable computational graph generation with dedicated modeling of distractor nodes. Fine-tuning Gemma-3 models using SFT followed by GRPO achieves comparable weighted accuracy on augmented benchmarks while using 89% fewer tokens than reasoning models. Importantly, this robustness emerges without explicit training on distractor-augmented examples.

The Problem: Distractors Break Mathematical Reasoning

We identify three types of distractors that cause significant performance degradation in LLMs:

RED Related Entity Distractor

Numerical info about same object type but different entities

"āĻ¤āĻžāĻ° āĻŦā§‹āĻ¨ āĻŦā§āĻ§āĻŦāĻžāĻ° ā§§ā§¨ āĻœāĻ¨ āĻ›ā§‡āĻ˛ā§‡āĻŽā§‡āĻ¯āĻŧā§‡āĻ° āĻ¸āĻ™ā§āĻ—ā§‡ āĻ˛ā§āĻ•ā§‹āĻšā§āĻ°āĻŋ āĻ–ā§‡āĻ˛ā§‡āĻ›āĻŋāĻ˛āĨ¤"

"Her sister played hide-and-seek with 12 children on Wednesday."

OAD Orthogonal Attribute Distractor

Properties in different dimensions than queried attribute

"āĻ¸ā§‹āĻŽāĻŦāĻžāĻ° āĻ–ā§‡āĻ˛āĻ¤ā§‡ ā§§ āĻ˜āĻŖā§āĻŸāĻž āĻ¸āĻŽāĻ¯āĻŧ āĻ˛ā§‡āĻ—ā§‡āĻ›āĻŋāĻ˛āĨ¤"

"It took 1 hour to play on Monday." (when question asks about count)

NEED Null-Effect Event Distractor

Actions with zero net impact (planned but not executed)

"āĻ°āĻžāĻœā§ ā§§ā§Ļā§Ļā§Ļ āĻŸāĻŋ āĻĻāĻŋāĻ¤ā§‡ āĻ°āĻžāĻœāĻŋ āĻšāĻ˛, āĻ•āĻŋāĻ¨ā§āĻ¤ā§ āĻĒāĻ°ā§‡ āĻ†āĻ° āĻĻāĻŋāĻ˛āĻ¨āĻžāĨ¤"

"Raju agreed to give 1000, but later didn't."

Performance Degradation Under Distractors

Standard CoT models drop up to 41 points accuracy. Even reasoning models with 5x more tokens drop 14-20 points.

-41 pts
Worst-case CoT drop

Our Solution: Computational Graph Generation

Why Graphs?

Instead of free-form Chain-of-Thought reasoning, DAGGER generates structured computational graphs:

1
Structured Output: JSON graphs are deterministically executable - no ambiguity in reasoning steps
2
Explicit Distractor Modeling: Each node has a distractor field to mark irrelevant information
3
Verifiable Execution: Graphs can be executed to verify correctness, enabling RL with execution-based rewards
4
Token Efficiency: Compact graph representation uses 89% fewer tokens than verbose reasoning chains

Graph Example

{
  "nodes": [
    {"id": "n1", "op": "const", "val": 100,
     "distractor": false, "label": "āĻŽāĻŋāĻ¨āĻžāĻ° āĻ•āĻ˛āĻŽ"},
    {"id": "n2", "op": "const", "val": 50,
     "distractor": true, "label": "āĻ°āĻžāĻœā§āĻ° āĻ•āĻ˛āĻŽ"},
    {"id": "n3", "op": "const", "val": 5,
     "distractor": false, "label": "āĻ•āĻ˛āĻŽā§‡āĻ° āĻĻāĻžāĻŽ"},
    {"id": "total", "op": "mul",
     "args": ["n1", "n3"], "distractor": false},
    {"id": "final_result", "op": "identity",
     "args": ["total"], "distractor": false}
  ]
}

Node n2 (Raju's pens) is marked as distractor and excluded from computation path.

Training Pipeline: SFT + GRPO

Stage 1: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)

  • Train on 3,000 verified graph examples
  • LoRA rank 64, 4 epochs
  • Establishes graph generation capability

Stage 2: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO)

  • 8 generations per prompt
  • Multi-component reward:
    • Format: +0.5 for valid JSON
    • Execution: +0.5 for successful run
    • Accuracy: +1.0 for correct answer

Key Finding: SFT initialization is critical for smaller models. 4B models without SFT show +18 point improvement when SFT is added before GRPO.

Results

Main Comparison

DAGGER achieves comparable accuracy to reasoning models while using 89% fewer tokens:

Model MGSM MSVAMP MGSM (+D) MSVAMP (+D) Tokens
Qwen 3-8B (Reasoning) 88.0 81.1 70.5 66.9 3,128
Gemma 3-12B (CoT) 76.8 72.3 54.3 48.7 599
DAGGER-12B Ours 78.4 78.8 64.0 66.8 359

(+D) = with distractors

Model Zoo

All models available on HuggingFace:

Model Training MGSM MSVAMP MGSM (+D) MSVAMP (+D) Weighted Avg
dagger-12B_SFT_GRPO Best SFT → GRPO 78.4 78.8 64.0 66.8 69.4
dagger-12B_SFT SFT only 70.0 76.8 56.8 65.4 66.7
dagger-12B_GRPO Base → GRPO 67.6 75.0 48.4 59.6 61.5
dagger-4B_SFT_GRPO SFT → GRPO 54.8 70.3 31.4 42.9 47.3
dagger-4B_SFT SFT only 40.4 65.0 25.1 42.4 44.3
dagger-4B_GRPO Base → GRPO 29.2 57.1 13.1 29.3 32.5

Datasets

DistractMath-BN (Evaluation)

Distractor-augmented benchmark for evaluating robustness

3,685
Total Examples
3
Distractor Types
2
Source Datasets
Download Benchmark

DAGGER Training Data

Verified computational graph annotations for training

3,000
Training Examples
481
Validation Examples
2
Configs (SFT/GRPO)
Download Training Data

BibTeX

@inproceedings{nazi2026dagger,
  title={{\dag}DAGGER: Distractor-Aware Graph Generation for Executable Reasoning in Math Problems},
  author={Zabir Al Nazi and Shubhashis Roy Dipta and Sudipta Kar},
  booktitle={Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026},
  year={2026},
  eprint={2601.06853},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.CL},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06853},
}