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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Seals, Spencer M., Shalin, Valerie L.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.05452
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author Seals, Spencer M.
Shalin, Valerie L.
author_facet Seals, Spencer M.
Shalin, Valerie L.
contents The development of highly fluent large language models (LLMs) has prompted increased interest in assessing their reasoning and problem-solving capabilities. We investigate whether several LLMs can solve a classic type of deductive reasoning problem from the cognitive science literature. The tested LLMs have limited abilities to solve these problems in their conventional form. We performed follow up experiments to investigate if changes to the presentation format and content improve model performance. We do find performance differences between conditions; however, they do not improve overall performance. Moreover, we find that performance interacts with presentation format and content in unexpected ways that differ from human performance. Overall, our results suggest that LLMs have unique reasoning biases that are only partially predicted from human reasoning performance and the human-generated language corpora that informs them.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_05452
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating the Deductive Competence of Large Language Models
Seals, Spencer M.
Shalin, Valerie L.
Computation and Language
The development of highly fluent large language models (LLMs) has prompted increased interest in assessing their reasoning and problem-solving capabilities. We investigate whether several LLMs can solve a classic type of deductive reasoning problem from the cognitive science literature. The tested LLMs have limited abilities to solve these problems in their conventional form. We performed follow up experiments to investigate if changes to the presentation format and content improve model performance. We do find performance differences between conditions; however, they do not improve overall performance. Moreover, we find that performance interacts with presentation format and content in unexpected ways that differ from human performance. Overall, our results suggest that LLMs have unique reasoning biases that are only partially predicted from human reasoning performance and the human-generated language corpora that informs them.
title Evaluating the Deductive Competence of Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.05452