In plain words: Tested eight models on subtraction, which they do worse than addition: when the answer is negative, they write the right number but drop the minus sign, even though it knows better. Few examples help; models trained to follow instructions get the sign right almost always.
Abstract · Can LLMs subtract numbers?
We present a systematic study of subtraction in large language models (LLMs). While prior benchmarks emphasize addition and multiplication, subtraction has received comparatively little attention despite being structurally distinct as a non-commutative operation. We evaluate eight pretrained LLMs spanning four families on addition and subtraction problems. Our experiments reveal that subtraction accuracy lags behind addition by a wide margin. We find that the errors for ($a-b$) are concentrated in cases where ($a<b$). In such cases, LLMs frequently produce the correct magnitude but omit the negative sign. Probing analyses show that LLMs internally encode whether results should be negative, yet this information is often not reflected in generated outputs. We further test well-known techniques such as few-shot learning and instruction-tuning to see if they can improve the LLMs' performance. Our results suggest that while few-shot prompting yields modest gains, the instruction-tuned models achieve near-perfect accuracies in generating the negative sign. Together, these findings provide a clearer characterization of the limitations and recoverability of LLMs' arithmetic capabilities in subtraction.
Mayank Jobanputra, Nils Philipp Walter, Maitrey Mehta, Blerta Veseli, Evan Parker Kelly Chapple, Yifan Wang, Sneha Chetani, Ellie Pavlick, Antonio Vergari, Vera Demberg
arXiv:2511.02795 · cs.LG, cs.CL · submitted Nov 4, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Work-in-progress; MathNLP non-archival presentation