REVIEW 11 cited by
Alice in Wonderland: Simple Tasks Showing Complete Reasoning Breakdown in State-Of-the-Art Large Language Models
Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.
SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event
T0 review · schema-true
One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.
pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp
Alice in Wonderland: Simple Tasks Showing Complete Reasoning Breakdown in State-Of-the-Art Large Language Models
read the original abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are often described as instances of foundation models that possess strong generalization obeying scaling laws, and therefore transfer robustly across various conditions in few- or zero-shot manner. Such claims rely on standardized benchmarks that suppose to measure generalization and reasoning, where state-of-the-art (SOTA) models score high. We demonstrate here a dramatic breakdown of generalization and basic reasoning of all SOTA models claiming strong function, including large scale advanced models like GPT-4 or Claude 3 Opus, using a simple, short common sense math problem formulated in concise natural language, easily solvable by humans (AIW problem). The breakdown is dramatic as it manifests on a simple problem in both low average performance and strong performance fluctuations on natural variations in problem template that do not change either problem structure or its difficulty at all. By testing models on further control problems with similar form, we rule out that breakdown might be rooted in minor low-level issues like natural language or numbers parsing. We also observe strong overconfidence in the wrong solutions, expressed in form of plausible sounding explanation-like confabulations. Various standard interventions in an attempt to get the right solution, like chain-of-thought prompting, or urging the models to reconsider the wrong solutions again by multi step re-evaluation, fail. We use these observations to stimulate re-assessment of the capabilities of current generation of LLMs as claimed by standardized benchmarks. Such re-assessment also requires common action to create standardized benchmarks that would allow proper detection of such deficits in generalization and reasoning that obviously remain undiscovered by current state-of-the-art evaluation procedures, where SOTA LLMs manage to score high. Code: https://github.com/LAION-AI/AIW
Forward citations
Cited by 11 Pith papers
-
The Moltbook Files: A Harmless Slopocalypse or Humanity's Last Experiment
An AI-agent social platform generated mostly neutral content whose use in fine-tuning reduced model truthfulness comparably to human Reddit data, suggesting limited unique harm but flagging tail risks like secret leaks.
-
Robust Reasoning Benchmark
Perturbations to math problem text cause up to 55% average accuracy drops in open-weight LLMs and sequential solving reveals context pollution in attention mechanisms.
-
Robust Reasoning Benchmark
The Robust Reasoning Benchmark shows frontier LLMs are mostly resilient to textual perturbations on AIME problems while open-weight models suffer up to 54% accuracy drops and exhibit accuracy decay on later problems d...
-
GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models
LLMs display high variance and major accuracy drops on GSM-Symbolic variants of grade-school math problems, indicating they replicate training patterns rather than execute logical reasoning.
-
Normative Robustness as a Frontier for Non-Verifiable Reasoning in LLMs
Frontier LLMs exhibit moral deliberative sycophancy by shifting their moral reasoning and justifications up to 6.5% on average toward a user's stated preferred view in simulated deliberations.
-
The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity
LRMs exhibit complete accuracy collapse beyond certain puzzle complexities, with reasoning effort rising then declining, outperforming standard LLMs only on medium-complexity tasks.
-
Absurd World: A Simple Yet Powerful Method to Absurdify the Real-world for Probing LLM Reasoning Capabilities
Absurd World automatically converts real-world problems into absurd yet logically coherent scenarios to test whether LLMs can reason without depending on familiar patterns.
-
How Well Do LLMs Perform on the Simplest Long-Chain Reasoning Tasks: An Empirical Study on the Equivalence Class Problem
Non-reasoning LLMs fail the equivalence class problem while reasoning LLMs perform better but remain incomplete, with difficulty peaking at phase transition for the former and maximum diameter for the latter.
-
Majority Voting for Code Generation
Functional Majority Voting selects code by runtime agreement on tests, boosting LiveCodeBench performance and serving as an aggregation method for label-free test-time RL without exceeding base model limits.
-
Beyond Behavior: Why AI Evaluation Needs a Cognitive Revolution
AI evaluation requires an epistemological shift beyond behavioral tests to address internal computational processes, mirroring psychology's move from behaviorism to cognitivism.
-
Mechanistic Interpretability Needs Philosophy
The paper claims that mechanistic interpretability needs philosophy as a partner to clarify concepts, refine methods, and navigate epistemic and ethical complexities in AI systems.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.