Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models on Dynamic Tasks
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866909729931919360 |
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| author | Wong, Annie Bäck, Thomas Plaat, Aske van Stein, Niki Kononova, Anna V. |
| author_facet | Wong, Annie Bäck, Thomas Plaat, Aske van Stein, Niki Kononova, Anna V. |
| contents | Large language models excel on static benchmarks, but their ability as self-learning agents in dynamic environments remains unclear. We evaluate three prompting strategies: self-reflection, heuristic mutation, and planning across dynamic tasks with open-source models. We find that larger models generally outperform smaller ones, but that strategic prompting can close this performance gap. Second, an overly long prompt can negatively impact smaller models on basic reactive tasks, while larger models show more robust behaviour. Third, advanced prompting techniques primarily benefit smaller models on complex games, but offer less improvement for already high-performing large language models. Yet, we find that advanced reasoning methods yield highly variable outcomes: while capable of significantly improving performance when reasoning and decision-making align, they also introduce instability and can lead to big performance drops. Compared to human performance, our findings reveal little evidence of true emergent reasoning. Instead, large language model performance exhibits persistent limitations in areas like planning and spatial coordination, suggesting that large language models still suffer fundamental shortcomings that may not be fully overcome through self-reflective prompting alone. Reasoning is a multi-faceted task, and while methods like Chain-of-thought improve multi-step reasoning on math word problems, our findings using dynamic benchmarks highlight important shortcomings in general reasoning capabilities, indicating a need to move beyond static benchmarks to capture the complexity of reasoning. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_10543 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models on Dynamic Tasks Wong, Annie Bäck, Thomas Plaat, Aske van Stein, Niki Kononova, Anna V. Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Large language models excel on static benchmarks, but their ability as self-learning agents in dynamic environments remains unclear. We evaluate three prompting strategies: self-reflection, heuristic mutation, and planning across dynamic tasks with open-source models. We find that larger models generally outperform smaller ones, but that strategic prompting can close this performance gap. Second, an overly long prompt can negatively impact smaller models on basic reactive tasks, while larger models show more robust behaviour. Third, advanced prompting techniques primarily benefit smaller models on complex games, but offer less improvement for already high-performing large language models. Yet, we find that advanced reasoning methods yield highly variable outcomes: while capable of significantly improving performance when reasoning and decision-making align, they also introduce instability and can lead to big performance drops. Compared to human performance, our findings reveal little evidence of true emergent reasoning. Instead, large language model performance exhibits persistent limitations in areas like planning and spatial coordination, suggesting that large language models still suffer fundamental shortcomings that may not be fully overcome through self-reflective prompting alone. Reasoning is a multi-faceted task, and while methods like Chain-of-thought improve multi-step reasoning on math word problems, our findings using dynamic benchmarks highlight important shortcomings in general reasoning capabilities, indicating a need to move beyond static benchmarks to capture the complexity of reasoning. |
| title | Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models on Dynamic Tasks |
| topic | Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10543 |