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Omega: Can LLMs Reason Outside the Box in Math? (arxiv.org)
4 points by marojejian on Jun 25, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A new test set builds math problems from templates to check three things: using known skills on harder versions, combining separate skills, and inventing fresh strategies. Top models drop sharply as problems get harder, and extra training helps only with the harder familiar ones.

Abstract · OMEGA: Can LLMs Reason Outside the Box in Math? Evaluating Exploratory, Compositional, and Transformative Generalization

Recent large-scale language models (LLMs) with long Chain-of-Thought reasoning-such as DeepSeek-R1-have achieved impressive results on Olympiad-level mathematics benchmarks. However, they often rely on a narrow set of strategies and struggle with problems that require a novel way of thinking. To systematically investigate these limitations, we introduce OMEGA-Out-of-distribution Math Problems Evaluation with 3 Generalization Axes-a controlled yet diverse benchmark designed to evaluate three axes of out-of-distribution generalization, inspired by Boden's typology of creativity: (1) Exploratory-applying known problem solving skills to more complex instances within the same problem domain; (2) Compositional-combining distinct reasoning skills, previously learned in isolation, to solve novel problems that require integrating these skills in new and coherent ways; and (3) Transformative-adopting novel, often unconventional strategies by moving beyond familiar approaches to solve problems more effectively. OMEGA consists of programmatically generated training-test pairs derived from templated problem generators across geometry, number theory, algebra, combinatorics, logic, and puzzles, with solutions verified using symbolic, numerical, or graphical methods. We evaluate frontier (or top-tier) LLMs and observe sharp performance degradation as problem complexity increases. Moreover, we fine-tune the Qwen-series models across all generalization settings and observe notable improvements in exploratory generalization, while compositional generalization remains limited and transformative reasoning shows little to no improvement. By isolating and quantifying these fine-grained failures, OMEGA lays the groundwork for advancing LLMs toward genuine mathematical creativity beyond mechanical proficiency.

Yiyou Sun, Shawn Hu, Georgia Zhou, Ken Zheng, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Nouha Dziri, Dawn Song
arXiv:2506.18880 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Jun 23, 2025
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Post: https://allenai.org/blog/omega

Comments from the Author: https://x.com/nouhadziri/status/1937567606543716508

Dziri's research has been my favorite in terms of probing the limits/weaknesses of transformers. This seems to be consistent with her past findings: any form of these models are poor at compositional generalization.