Recitation over Reasoning: How Cutting-Edge Language Models Can Fail on Elementary School-Level Reasoning Problems?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yan, Kai, Xu, Yufei, Du, Zhengyin, Yao, Xuesong, Wang, Zheyu, Guo, Xiaowen, Chen, Jiecao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yan, Kai
Xu, Yufei
Du, Zhengyin
Yao, Xuesong
Wang, Zheyu
Guo, Xiaowen
Chen, Jiecao
author_facet Yan, Kai
Xu, Yufei
Du, Zhengyin
Yao, Xuesong
Wang, Zheyu
Guo, Xiaowen
Chen, Jiecao
contents The rapid escalation from elementary school-level to frontier problems of the difficulty for LLM benchmarks in recent years have weaved a miracle for researchers that we are only inches away from surpassing human intelligence. However, is the LLMs' remarkable reasoning ability indeed comes from true intelligence by human standards, or are they simply reciting solutions witnessed during training at an Internet level? To study this problem, we propose RoR-Bench, a novel, multi-modal benchmark for detecting LLM's recitation behavior when asked simple reasoning problems but with conditions subtly shifted, and conduct empirical analysis on our benchmark. Surprisingly, we found existing cutting-edge LLMs unanimously exhibits extremely severe recitation behavior; by changing one phrase in the condition, top models such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 can suffer 60 percent performance loss on elementary school-level arithmetic and reasoning problems. Such findings are a wake-up call to the LLM community that compels us to re-evaluate the true intelligence level of cutting-edge LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_00509
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Recitation over Reasoning: How Cutting-Edge Language Models Can Fail on Elementary School-Level Reasoning Problems?
Yan, Kai
Xu, Yufei
Du, Zhengyin
Yao, Xuesong
Wang, Zheyu
Guo, Xiaowen
Chen, Jiecao
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
The rapid escalation from elementary school-level to frontier problems of the difficulty for LLM benchmarks in recent years have weaved a miracle for researchers that we are only inches away from surpassing human intelligence. However, is the LLMs' remarkable reasoning ability indeed comes from true intelligence by human standards, or are they simply reciting solutions witnessed during training at an Internet level? To study this problem, we propose RoR-Bench, a novel, multi-modal benchmark for detecting LLM's recitation behavior when asked simple reasoning problems but with conditions subtly shifted, and conduct empirical analysis on our benchmark. Surprisingly, we found existing cutting-edge LLMs unanimously exhibits extremely severe recitation behavior; by changing one phrase in the condition, top models such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 can suffer 60 percent performance loss on elementary school-level arithmetic and reasoning problems. Such findings are a wake-up call to the LLM community that compels us to re-evaluate the true intelligence level of cutting-edge LLMs.
title Recitation over Reasoning: How Cutting-Edge Language Models Can Fail on Elementary School-Level Reasoning Problems?
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00509