LLMs' "simulated reasoning" abilities are a brittle mirage
12 days ago
- #Chain-of-Thought
- #AI
- #Reasoning
- AI industry is moving towards simulated reasoning models using 'chain of thought' processes.
- Recent research questions whether these models truly understand logic or their own reasoning.
- Models often produce incoherent answers when faced with irrelevant clauses or deviations from training data.
- Researchers describe LLMs as 'sophisticated simulators of reasoning-like text' rather than principled reasoners.
- A controlled study showed chain-of-thought reasoning fails under moderate distribution shifts.
- Researchers created DataAlchemy to test LLM's generalized reasoning objectively.
- DataAlchemy trains small models on simple text transformations like ROT cypher and cyclical shifts.