Can Language Models Rival Mathematics Students? Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning through Textual Manipulation and Human Experiments

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Nikolaiev, Andrii, Stathopoulos, Yiannos, Teufel, Simone
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Nikolaiev, Andrii
Stathopoulos, Yiannos
Teufel, Simone
author_facet Nikolaiev, Andrii
Stathopoulos, Yiannos
Teufel, Simone
contents In this paper we look at the ability of recent large language models (LLMs) at solving mathematical problems in combinatorics. We compare models LLaMA-2, LLaMA-3.1, GPT-4, and Mixtral against each other and against human pupils and undergraduates with prior experience in mathematical olympiads. To facilitate these comparisons we introduce the Combi-Puzzles dataset, which contains 125 problem variants based on 25 combinatorial reasoning problems. Each problem is presented in one of five distinct forms, created by systematically manipulating the problem statements through adversarial additions, numeric parameter changes, and linguistic obfuscation. Our variations preserve the mathematical core and are designed to measure the generalisability of LLM problem-solving abilities, while also increasing confidence that problems are submitted to LLMs in forms that have not been seen as training instances. We found that a model based on GPT-4 outperformed all other models in producing correct responses, and performed significantly better in the mathematical variation of the problems than humans. We also found that modifications to problem statements significantly impact the LLM's performance, while human performance remains unaffected.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_11908
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can Language Models Rival Mathematics Students? Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning through Textual Manipulation and Human Experiments
Nikolaiev, Andrii
Stathopoulos, Yiannos
Teufel, Simone
Computation and Language
In this paper we look at the ability of recent large language models (LLMs) at solving mathematical problems in combinatorics. We compare models LLaMA-2, LLaMA-3.1, GPT-4, and Mixtral against each other and against human pupils and undergraduates with prior experience in mathematical olympiads. To facilitate these comparisons we introduce the Combi-Puzzles dataset, which contains 125 problem variants based on 25 combinatorial reasoning problems. Each problem is presented in one of five distinct forms, created by systematically manipulating the problem statements through adversarial additions, numeric parameter changes, and linguistic obfuscation. Our variations preserve the mathematical core and are designed to measure the generalisability of LLM problem-solving abilities, while also increasing confidence that problems are submitted to LLMs in forms that have not been seen as training instances. We found that a model based on GPT-4 outperformed all other models in producing correct responses, and performed significantly better in the mathematical variation of the problems than humans. We also found that modifications to problem statements significantly impact the LLM's performance, while human performance remains unaffected.
title Can Language Models Rival Mathematics Students? Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning through Textual Manipulation and Human Experiments
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11908