Navigating the Labyrinth: Evaluating LLMs' Ability to Reason About Search Problems

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Borazjanizadeh, Nasim, Herzig, Roei, Darrell, Trevor, Feris, Rogerio, Karlinsky, Leonid
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Borazjanizadeh, Nasim
Herzig, Roei
Darrell, Trevor
Feris, Rogerio
Karlinsky, Leonid
author_facet Borazjanizadeh, Nasim
Herzig, Roei
Darrell, Trevor
Feris, Rogerio
Karlinsky, Leonid
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently achieved impressive performance in math and reasoning benchmarks. However, they often struggle with logic problems and puzzles that are relatively easy for humans. To further investigate this, we introduce a new benchmark, SearchBench, which contains 11 unique search problems inspired by intuitive puzzles. Each SearchBench problem type is equipped with automated pipelines to generate an arbitrary number of instances and analyze the feasibility, correctness, and optimality of LLM-generated solutions. We show that using step-by-step, language-only reasoning, even the most advanced LLMs fail to solve SearchBench; for example, OpenAI's frontier models GPT-4 and o1-preview solve only 1.4% and 18.6% of problems, respectively. The reason is that SearchBench problems require considering multiple pathways and performing backtracking, posing a significant challenge to auto-regressive models. Interestingly, performance is significantly boosted when we prompt models to generate a complete A* search algorithm - a comparatively more cognitively difficult task. This approach effectively offloads the iterative search and backtracking process from the models, which they struggle with in text. This in-context learning baseline is further enhanced via a Multi-Stage-Multi-Try (MSMT) inference method, increasing GPT-4's rate of correct solutions to over 57%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_12172
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Navigating the Labyrinth: Evaluating LLMs' Ability to Reason About Search Problems
Borazjanizadeh, Nasim
Herzig, Roei
Darrell, Trevor
Feris, Rogerio
Karlinsky, Leonid
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently achieved impressive performance in math and reasoning benchmarks. However, they often struggle with logic problems and puzzles that are relatively easy for humans. To further investigate this, we introduce a new benchmark, SearchBench, which contains 11 unique search problems inspired by intuitive puzzles. Each SearchBench problem type is equipped with automated pipelines to generate an arbitrary number of instances and analyze the feasibility, correctness, and optimality of LLM-generated solutions. We show that using step-by-step, language-only reasoning, even the most advanced LLMs fail to solve SearchBench; for example, OpenAI's frontier models GPT-4 and o1-preview solve only 1.4% and 18.6% of problems, respectively. The reason is that SearchBench problems require considering multiple pathways and performing backtracking, posing a significant challenge to auto-regressive models. Interestingly, performance is significantly boosted when we prompt models to generate a complete A* search algorithm - a comparatively more cognitively difficult task. This approach effectively offloads the iterative search and backtracking process from the models, which they struggle with in text. This in-context learning baseline is further enhanced via a Multi-Stage-Multi-Try (MSMT) inference method, increasing GPT-4's rate of correct solutions to over 57%.
title Navigating the Labyrinth: Evaluating LLMs' Ability to Reason About Search Problems
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12172