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Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs

arxiv.org

21–30 of 393 posts

Re: Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs

#21
Many of the datasets for the "benchmarks" on which the major public LLMs are assessed are clearly present in their training data, making them basically useless for establishing reliability of the models. Its fairly obvious that at least some of the improved scores from later generations of models are that this benchmark data is increasingly represented in the training data.

A better way of assessing LLMs is waiting a few weeks until novel tests have been created explicitly absent from all prior training data, and then using those.

As has been shown, eg., on legal test, exams, etc. performance drops off a cliff when future out-sample data is actually used. Rather than these faked pretend out-sample benchmarks.

Re: Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great observation. It would be really interesting to repeat this research with less limiting prompts. I assume they made the restriction to make it easier to parse the answers, perhaps make it two phase, let them respond unlimited, then a follow up prompt ask to compress it to a single answer. I wonder how the results will vary.

To be quite honest, I assume they made the restriction so that the models would fail. This sort of paper is becoming a genre.

It is a proof of weakness in the current system. This makes sense and births new hypotheses.

Re: Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs

#23
post #3

Question is: "Alice has 60 brothers and she also has 212 sisters. How many sisters does Alice’s brother have?" (nb: I have added numbers, it's phrased as X and N in the paper) I must confess, when I tried to answer the question I got it wrong...! (I feel silly). I only realised I got it wrong when I plugged it into GPT-4o and it came back with the correct answer: https://chatgpt.com/share/6eb5fa36-e0fd-4417-87d1-64ca…

>Worth noting that the prompts from the experiment include "To answer the question, DO NOT OUTPUT ANY TEXT EXCEPT following format that contains final answer: ### Answer:" so it appears that they are stopping the models from 'thinking out loud'. If I add that to the prompt, GPT4o gets it consistently wrong...

Yes this is a common thing I see people who think LLMs are idiots do.

The more an LLM talks the smarter it gets _because that's the only way it can compute anything_. Imagine saying that Turing machines fail the Church–Turing thesis because they can't solve 3-sat for N variables in N moves or less.

That's what you're doing to an LLM when you ask it to be concise.

Re: Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs

#24
post #10
post #3

Question is: "Alice has 60 brothers and she also has 212 sisters. How many sisters does Alice’s brother have?" (nb: I have added numbers, it's phrased as X and N in the paper) I must confess, when I tried to answer the question I got it wrong...! (I feel silly). I only realised I got it wrong when I plugged it into GPT-4o and it came back with the correct answer: https://chatgpt.com/share/6eb5fa36-e0fd-4417-87d1-64ca…

There must be a name for the new phenomenon, of which your post is an example, of: 1. Someone expresses that an LLM cannot do some trivial task. 2. Another person declares that they cannot do the task, thereby defending the legitimacy of the LLM. As a side note, I cannot believe that the average person who can navigate to a chatgpt prompter would fail to correctly answer this question given sufficient motivation to d…

There's also the phenomenon of papers showing ChatGPT getting it wrong, then people posting anecdotal examples of it getting it right when they try it, but that one already has a couple of names: WORKSFORME or Unable to Reproduce

Hey folks, ever considered the possibility that unreproduceability is not a good thing?

Re: Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs

#25
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There must be a name for the new phenomenon, of which your post is an example, of: 1. Someone expresses that an LLM cannot do some trivial task. 2. Another person declares that they cannot do the task, thereby defending the legitimacy of the LLM. As a side note, I cannot believe that the average person who can navigate to a chatgpt prompter would fail to correctly answer this question given sufficient motivation to d…

Well, why does it need a name? It just seems like a "correct argument". If somebody is claiming that AI is "not all that" because it can make stupid mistakes, surely it's relevant that humans also make stupid mistakes, so AI making them does not necessarily pose a hindrance to it becoming a human-tier reasoner.

It’s worth giving names to interesting phenomena as it helps people to identify and understand them. I find this phenomenon interesting because a person who wants the defend the LLM from apparent criticism is probably more likely to exhibit it.

Re: Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs

#27
post #3

Question is: "Alice has 60 brothers and she also has 212 sisters. How many sisters does Alice’s brother have?" (nb: I have added numbers, it's phrased as X and N in the paper) I must confess, when I tried to answer the question I got it wrong...! (I feel silly). I only realised I got it wrong when I plugged it into GPT-4o and it came back with the correct answer: https://chatgpt.com/share/6eb5fa36-e0fd-4417-87d1-64ca…

I got it in 5 seconds, am I the singularity ?

Do you sleep, get sick, require more than compute hardware/storage/networking/electricity?

Re: Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs

#28
I tried asking Claude variants where N was something other than a nonnegative integer, and he properly pointed out the absurdity, but was willing to play along once I brought up theoretical physics:

[...] So, in our quantum mechanics interpretation, how many sisters does Alice's brother have? It's a superposition of states:

1. In one state, he has Alice as his sister (+1) and the "antisister" (-1), totaling 0 sisters. If they met, they'd annihilate, leaving him sisterless!

2. In another state, he has Alice (+1) and owes a future sister to the quantum family field (-1). Currently, that's 0 sisters, but he's in "sister debt."

3. In a third state, he has Alice (+1), but his family's entanglement means another family's loss of a sister affects him too (-1). Bizarrely, he experiences both having and not having a sister simultaneously.

This interpretation is, of course, a playful and highly metaphorical application of quantum concepts to something they don't actually apply to—family relationships. In reality, quantum effects like superposition and entanglement are incredibly delicate. They typically only persist in highly controlled conditions, like ultra-cold atoms or isolated photons. The constant interactions in a family would "decohere" any such quantum states almost instantly.

Re: Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs

#29
"Alice has N brothers and she also has M sisters. How many sisters does Alice’s brother have?"

Gemini nailed it with no extra prompting.

https://g.co/gemini/share/6946d20c0a4d

When I gave it numbers, Gemini got confused.

Alice has 4 brothers and she also has 3 sisters. How many sisters does Alice’s brother have?

https://g.co/gemini/share/14d34dcdc5df

But then when I suggested that it might be a trick question, it nailed it again:

https://g.co/gemini/share/e1f1ce8f32a8

note: I didn't try 60/212 siblings - I consider this an unfair question because it's a reasonable assumption that Alice is a type of creature (human?) that cannot have hundreds of siblings, and thus I don't expect a respondent to give a "correct" answer.

Re: Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs

#30
Tech Bros just yesterday yelled at their lungs that AI overtake is just around the corner just like Tesla FSD and Fusion. And Quantum computing.

All in for scientific progress, experimentation and failure but there's clear case of hype train and jacking up valuations is also riding along, very confidently and shamelessly.

An average tech outsider investor would be having a FOMO with that kind of crazy tall promises and tall claims that are being made, constantly and must be called out as such because they undermine the confidence of the general public in serious and grounded science in the long run which would lead to science deniers and nay sayers in the long run.

Pursuit of science is noblest of all pursuits. A hasty and greedy purely capitalist commercialisation pursuit, I am not so sure.

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