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

arxiv.org

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

#181

Post by twobitshifter »

>AIW+ problem has following form: "Alice has 3 sisters. Her mother has 1 sister who does not have children - she has 7 nephews and nieces and also 2 brothers. Alice’s father has a brother who has 5 nephews and nieces in total, and who has also 1 son. How many cousins does Alice’s sister have?". The solution to AIW+ problem is harder to obtain than the solution to common sense AIW with very simple structure. Solving AIW+ requires taking different paternal sides, that of mother and father, and carefully calculating the number of cousins, taking care of subtracting Alice and her sister, and summing up the total number of cousins from both sides, for instance: on the mother side: 7 (total nephews and nieces) - 4 (Alice and her sisters) = 3 cousins; on the father side: 5 (total nephews and nieces) + 1 (own son of the father’s brother) - 4 (Alice and her sisters) = 2 cousins; summing up 3 + 2 = 5 cousins which Alice and any of her sisters have.

So I’m sure after the author’s created 100s of these family tree problems the answer here seems clear to them, but there are some unknowns to solve it as written.

1) Does Alice have brothers? Her mother must, but it is phrased as if her mother has 1 sister and her sister has 2 brothers, so we have to deduce that she has 3 siblings.

2) Along the same lines, does her father have a sister?

3) Do her Aunts and Uncles have nephews and nieces by marriage?

I think the LLM would still fail if these answers were made explicitly clear in the prompt. However, I could see the same problem ending with, Alice has only 4 cousins, how can that be?

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

#182

Post by felipemnoa »

bamboozled wrote: post #6
Closi wrote: 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 ?

We all are, but only in meat-space. We continue to improve ourselves much faster than evolution ever could.

But what we are talking about here is the singularity in tech-space.

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

#183

Post by CooCooCaCha »

ajuc wrote: post #161
CooCooCaCha wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re using “inner monologue” too literally. It could be a progression of pictures, emotions, etc.

With that definition even bacteria have inner monologue.

Can bacteria imagine pictures? Do they have emotions?

Why does this matter? Stop being so pedantic. We're talking about a progression of ideas. Talking in your head is one form of ideas, but people can easily solve problems by imagining them.

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

#184

Post by indoordin0saur »

solidasparagus wrote: post #164
indoordin0saur wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI needs to see thousands or millions of images of a cat before they reliably can identify one. The fact that a child needs to only see one example of a cat to know what a cat is from then on seems to point to humans having something very different.

> AI needs to see thousands or millions of images of a cat before they reliably can identify one. Not if they inherit from a previous generation of AI. But even if they did, a different training speed does not imply a different capability

My point is not that humans have a faster training speed but that humans must be doing something fundamentally different from LLMs. You could build Altman's $7 trillion dollar GPU cluster and use the majority of the world's energy to feed it and you'd still hit the same limitations if you're just running an LLM on it, even a very sophisticated LLM. This is Yann LeCun's position as well.

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

#185

Post by viking123 »

more_corn wrote: post #125
ericmcer wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI. At the same time though they are already doing way more than we thought they could. Maybe people were surprised by what OpenAI achieved so now they are all just praying that with enough compute and the right model AGI will emerge.

LLMs are the language center of an AI. They in no way purport to be: long term memory, critical thinking engines, calculators. If we want those things we can build them. Building them into the language center would be absurd and weird.

In the brain all those things are neural networks too, memory is encoded in the weights. So if we want to have that type of system, everyone should have their own model and the weights would actually adjust all the time just like in our brain, but now it is just trained once and that is that

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

#186

Post by indoordin0saur »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #180
indoordin0saur wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI needs to see thousands or millions of images of a cat before they reliably can identify one. The fact that a child needs to only see one example of a cat to know what a cat is from then on seems to point to humans having something very different.

Humans train on continuous video . Even our most expensive models are, in terms of training set size, far behind what an infant processes in the first year of their life. EDIT: and it takes human children a couple years to reliably identify a cat. My 2.5 y.o. daughter still confuses cats with small dogs, despite living under one roof with a cat.

I contend that you could show any child old enough to communicate in basic English a photograph (so not live continuous video) of some obscure animal they've never seen before (say an Okapi) and they'd be able to easily identify another Okapi when seeing one at a zoo.

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #154
glitchc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this particular case, is there any reason why we simply can't take their word for it? This is not a case of where if I say "weak" or "strong", most people pick strong because no one wants to be weak, even if the context is unknown (nuclear force for example).

> is there any reason why we simply can't take their word for it? because if we give them a problem to solve in their head and just give us the answer, they will. By problem I mean planning a trip, a meal, how to pay the mortgage, etc. It's impossible to plan without an internal monologue. Even if some people claim theirs is 'in images'.

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by rprospero »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #154
glitchc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this particular case, is there any reason why we simply can't take their word for it? This is not a case of where if I say "weak" or "strong", most people pick strong because no one wants to be weak, even if the context is unknown (nuclear force for example).

> is there any reason why we simply can't take their word for it? because if we give them a problem to solve in their head and just give us the answer, they will. By problem I mean planning a trip, a meal, how to pay the mortgage, etc. It's impossible to plan without an internal monologue. Even if some people claim theirs is 'in images'.

> It's impossible to plan without an internal monologue

I once had a teacher claim that people who claimed to have aphantasia were lying, because those people have read books and it is impossible to read a book without picture the scene in your mind's eye. Are you citing the same source that she was?

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

#189

Post by TeMPOraL »

slashdave wrote: post #178
glitchc wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is a good chunk of the global population is also not reasoning and thinking in any sense of the word. Logical reasoning is a higher order skill that often requires formal training. It's not a natural ability for human beings.

Seriously? You think individuals are incapable of reasoning without training first?

Do you think they are? We haven't had a case of individuals without training in like 10 000 years.

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

#190

Post by IlliOnato »

This is a cool one, but I know of other such "failures".

For example, try to ask (better in Russian), how many letters "а" are there in Russian word "банан". It seems all models answer with "3". Playing with it reveals that apparently LLMs confuse Russian "банан" with English "banana" (same meaning). Trying to get LLMs to produce a correct answer results is some hilarity.

I wonder if each "failure" of this kind deserves an academic article, though. Well, perhaps it does, when different models exhibit the same behaviour...

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