ReliableMath: Benchmark of Reliable Mathematical Reasoning on Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xue, Boyang, Zhu, Qi, Wang, Rui, Wang, Sheng, Wang, Hongru, Hu, Minda, Mi, Fei, Wang, Yasheng, Shang, Lifeng, Liu, Qun, Wong, Kam-Fai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xue, Boyang
Zhu, Qi
Wang, Rui
Wang, Sheng
Wang, Hongru
Hu, Minda
Mi, Fei
Wang, Yasheng
Shang, Lifeng
Liu, Qun
Wong, Kam-Fai
author_facet Xue, Boyang
Zhu, Qi
Wang, Rui
Wang, Sheng
Wang, Hongru
Hu, Minda
Mi, Fei
Wang, Yasheng
Shang, Lifeng
Liu, Qun
Wong, Kam-Fai
contents Although demonstrating remarkable performance on reasoning tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) still tend to fabricate unreliable responses when confronted with problems that are unsolvable or beyond their capability, severely undermining the reliability. Prior studies of LLM reliability have primarily focused on knowledge tasks to identify unanswerable questions, while mathematical reasoning tasks have remained unexplored due to the dearth of unsolvable math problems. To systematically investigate LLM reliability in mathematical reasoning tasks, we formulate the reliability evaluation for both solvable and unsolvable problems. We then develop a ReliableMath dataset which incorporates open-source solvable problems and high-quality unsolvable problems synthesized by our proposed construction workflow with human evaluations. Experiments are conducted on various LLMs with several key findings uncovered. LLMs fail to directly identify unsolvable problems and always generate fabricated responses. When instructing LLMs to indicate unsolvability using a reliable prompt, the reliability of larger-sized LLMs remains on solvable problems, but notably improves on unsolvable problems yet still falls short of solvable problems. However, small LLMs rarely show any progress despite employing reliable prompts. Therefore, we further propose an alignment strategy to enhance small LLMs' reliability, which can significantly improve LLM reliability performances on both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_03133
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ReliableMath: Benchmark of Reliable Mathematical Reasoning on Large Language Models
Xue, Boyang
Zhu, Qi
Wang, Rui
Wang, Sheng
Wang, Hongru
Hu, Minda
Mi, Fei
Wang, Yasheng
Shang, Lifeng
Liu, Qun
Wong, Kam-Fai
Computation and Language
Although demonstrating remarkable performance on reasoning tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) still tend to fabricate unreliable responses when confronted with problems that are unsolvable or beyond their capability, severely undermining the reliability. Prior studies of LLM reliability have primarily focused on knowledge tasks to identify unanswerable questions, while mathematical reasoning tasks have remained unexplored due to the dearth of unsolvable math problems. To systematically investigate LLM reliability in mathematical reasoning tasks, we formulate the reliability evaluation for both solvable and unsolvable problems. We then develop a ReliableMath dataset which incorporates open-source solvable problems and high-quality unsolvable problems synthesized by our proposed construction workflow with human evaluations. Experiments are conducted on various LLMs with several key findings uncovered. LLMs fail to directly identify unsolvable problems and always generate fabricated responses. When instructing LLMs to indicate unsolvability using a reliable prompt, the reliability of larger-sized LLMs remains on solvable problems, but notably improves on unsolvable problems yet still falls short of solvable problems. However, small LLMs rarely show any progress despite employing reliable prompts. Therefore, we further propose an alignment strategy to enhance small LLMs' reliability, which can significantly improve LLM reliability performances on both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks.
title ReliableMath: Benchmark of Reliable Mathematical Reasoning on Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03133