RE-IMAGINE: Symbolic Benchmark Synthesis for Reasoning Evaluation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Xinnuo, Lawrence, Rachel, Dubey, Kshitij, Pandey, Atharva, Ueno, Risa, Falck, Fabian, Nori, Aditya V., Sharma, Rahul, Sharma, Amit, Gonzalez, Javier
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Xinnuo
Lawrence, Rachel
Dubey, Kshitij
Pandey, Atharva
Ueno, Risa
Falck, Fabian
Nori, Aditya V.
Sharma, Rahul
Sharma, Amit
Gonzalez, Javier
author_facet Xu, Xinnuo
Lawrence, Rachel
Dubey, Kshitij
Pandey, Atharva
Ueno, Risa
Falck, Fabian
Nori, Aditya V.
Sharma, Rahul
Sharma, Amit
Gonzalez, Javier
contents Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have reported high accuracy on reasoning benchmarks. However, it is still unclear whether the observed results arise from true reasoning or from statistical recall of the training set. Inspired by the ladder of causation (Pearl, 2009) and its three levels (associations, interventions and counterfactuals), this paper introduces RE-IMAGINE, a framework to characterize a hierarchy of reasoning ability in LLMs, alongside an automated pipeline to generate problem variations at different levels of the hierarchy. By altering problems in an intermediate symbolic representation, RE-IMAGINE generates arbitrarily many problems that are not solvable using memorization alone. Moreover, the framework is general and can work across reasoning domains, including math, code, and logic. We demonstrate our framework on four widely-used benchmarks to evaluate several families of LLMs, and observe reductions in performance when the models are queried with problem variations. These assessments indicate a degree of reliance on statistical recall for past performance, and open the door to further research targeting skills across the reasoning hierarchy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_15455
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RE-IMAGINE: Symbolic Benchmark Synthesis for Reasoning Evaluation
Xu, Xinnuo
Lawrence, Rachel
Dubey, Kshitij
Pandey, Atharva
Ueno, Risa
Falck, Fabian
Nori, Aditya V.
Sharma, Rahul
Sharma, Amit
Gonzalez, Javier
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have reported high accuracy on reasoning benchmarks. However, it is still unclear whether the observed results arise from true reasoning or from statistical recall of the training set. Inspired by the ladder of causation (Pearl, 2009) and its three levels (associations, interventions and counterfactuals), this paper introduces RE-IMAGINE, a framework to characterize a hierarchy of reasoning ability in LLMs, alongside an automated pipeline to generate problem variations at different levels of the hierarchy. By altering problems in an intermediate symbolic representation, RE-IMAGINE generates arbitrarily many problems that are not solvable using memorization alone. Moreover, the framework is general and can work across reasoning domains, including math, code, and logic. We demonstrate our framework on four widely-used benchmarks to evaluate several families of LLMs, and observe reductions in performance when the models are queried with problem variations. These assessments indicate a degree of reliance on statistical recall for past performance, and open the door to further research targeting skills across the reasoning hierarchy.
title RE-IMAGINE: Symbolic Benchmark Synthesis for Reasoning Evaluation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15455