KisMATH: Do LLMs Have Knowledge of Implicit Structures in Mathematical Reasoning?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Saha, Soumadeep, Chaturvedi, Akshay, Saha, Saptarshi, Garain, Utpal, Asher, Nicholas
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Saha, Soumadeep
Chaturvedi, Akshay
Saha, Saptarshi
Garain, Utpal
Asher, Nicholas
author_facet Saha, Soumadeep
Chaturvedi, Akshay
Saha, Saptarshi
Garain, Utpal
Asher, Nicholas
contents Chain-of-thought (CoT) traces have been shown to improve performance of large language models on a plethora of reasoning tasks, yet there is no consensus on the mechanism by which this boost is achieved. To shed more light on this, we introduce Causal CoT Graphs (CCGraphs), which are directed acyclic graphs automatically extracted from reasoning traces that model fine-grained causal dependencies in language-model outputs. A collection of 1671 mathematical reasoning problems from MATH500, GSM8K, and AIME, together with their associated CCGraphs, has been compiled into our dataset -- KisMATH. Our detailed empirical analysis with 15 open-weight LLMs shows that (i) reasoning nodes in the CCGraphs are causal contributors to the final answer, which we argue is constitutive of reasoning; and (ii) LLMs emphasize the reasoning paths captured by the CCGraphs, indicating that the models internally realize structures similar to our graphs. KisMATH enables controlled, graph-aligned interventions and opens avenues for further investigation into the role of CoT in LLM reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_11408
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle KisMATH: Do LLMs Have Knowledge of Implicit Structures in Mathematical Reasoning?
Saha, Soumadeep
Chaturvedi, Akshay
Saha, Saptarshi
Garain, Utpal
Asher, Nicholas
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
Chain-of-thought (CoT) traces have been shown to improve performance of large language models on a plethora of reasoning tasks, yet there is no consensus on the mechanism by which this boost is achieved. To shed more light on this, we introduce Causal CoT Graphs (CCGraphs), which are directed acyclic graphs automatically extracted from reasoning traces that model fine-grained causal dependencies in language-model outputs. A collection of 1671 mathematical reasoning problems from MATH500, GSM8K, and AIME, together with their associated CCGraphs, has been compiled into our dataset -- KisMATH. Our detailed empirical analysis with 15 open-weight LLMs shows that (i) reasoning nodes in the CCGraphs are causal contributors to the final answer, which we argue is constitutive of reasoning; and (ii) LLMs emphasize the reasoning paths captured by the CCGraphs, indicating that the models internally realize structures similar to our graphs. KisMATH enables controlled, graph-aligned interventions and opens avenues for further investigation into the role of CoT in LLM reasoning.
title KisMATH: Do LLMs Have Knowledge of Implicit Structures in Mathematical Reasoning?
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11408