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Fn Benchmarks for Robust Evaluation of Reasoning Performance, and Reasoning Gap (arxiv.org)
2 points by ofou on Mar 2, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: Math problems are rewritten as templates with changing numbers, so a model that truly reasons should do equally well on the original and the fresh version. Models that ace the originals show gaps of 58% to 80% on fresh versions, though better prompting helps.

Abstract · Functional Benchmarks for Robust Evaluation of Reasoning Performance, and the Reasoning Gap

We propose a framework for robust evaluation of reasoning capabilities of language models, using functional variants of benchmarks. Models that solve a reasoning test should exhibit no difference in performance over the static version of a problem compared to a snapshot of the functional variant. We have rewritten the relevant fragment of the MATH benchmark into its functional variant MATH(), with functionalization of other benchmarks to follow. When evaluating current state-of-the-art models over snapshots of MATH(), we find a reasoning gap -- the percentage difference between the static and functional accuracies. We find reasoning gaps from 58.35% to 80.31% among the state-of-the-art closed and open weights models that perform well on static benchmarks, with the caveat that the gaps are likely to be smaller with more sophisticated prompting strategies. Here we show that models which anecdotally have good reasoning performance over real-world tasks, have quantifiable lower gaps, motivating the open problem of building "gap 0" models. Code for evaluation and new evaluation datasets, three MATH() snapshots, are publicly available at https://github.com/consequentai/fneval/.

Saurabh Srivastava, Annarose M B, Anto P, Shashank Menon, Ajay Sukumar, Adwaith Samod T, Alan Philipose, Stevin Prince, Sooraj Thomas
arXiv:2402.19450 · cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted Feb 29, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 37 pages, 10 figures

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LLMs, including GPT-4, excel in identifying patterns and predicting words based on vast data analysis, but they struggle with reasoning because this requires a level of understanding beyond mere statistics. True comprehension involves grasping the nuances of language, context, and abstract concepts, something LLMs can't achieve with pattern recognition alone. This gap highlights why complex reasoning tasks remain challenging for such models.