Investigating Advanced Reasoning of Large Language Models via Black-Box Environment Interaction

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Yin, Congchi, Wu, Tianyi, Shu, Yankai, Gu, Alex, Wang, Yunhan, Shao, Jun, Jiang, Xun, Li, Piji
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Yin, Congchi
Wu, Tianyi
Shu, Yankai
Gu, Alex
Wang, Yunhan
Shao, Jun
Jiang, Xun
Li, Piji
author_facet Yin, Congchi
Wu, Tianyi
Shu, Yankai
Gu, Alex
Wang, Yunhan
Shao, Jun
Jiang, Xun
Li, Piji
contents Existing tasks fall short in evaluating reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in an interactive, unknown environment. This deficiency leads to the isolated assessment of deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning, neglecting the integrated reasoning process that is indispensable for human-like discovery learning. We introduce a novel evaluation paradigm, \textit{black-box environment interaction}, to tackle this challenge. A black-box environment is defined by a hidden function that maps a specific set of inputs to outputs. LLMs are required to unravel the hidden function behind the black-box environment by interacting with it in given exploration turns, and reasoning over observed input-output pairs. Leveraging this idea, we build the \textsc{Oracle} benchmark which comprises 6 types of black-box task with 96 black-box environments. 19 modern LLMs are benchmarked. o3, a leading LLM from OpenAI, ranks first in 5 of the 6 tasks, achieving over 70\% accuracy on most easy black-box environments. But it still struggles with some hard black-box tasks, where the average performance drops below 40\%. Further analysis reveals a universal difficulty among LLMs: They lack the high-level planning capability to develop efficient and adaptive exploration strategies for hypothesis refinement. Code is available in https://github.com/lemonsis/Oracle_Benchmark.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_19035
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Investigating Advanced Reasoning of Large Language Models via Black-Box Environment Interaction
Yin, Congchi
Wu, Tianyi
Shu, Yankai
Gu, Alex
Wang, Yunhan
Shao, Jun
Jiang, Xun
Li, Piji
Artificial Intelligence
Existing tasks fall short in evaluating reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in an interactive, unknown environment. This deficiency leads to the isolated assessment of deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning, neglecting the integrated reasoning process that is indispensable for human-like discovery learning. We introduce a novel evaluation paradigm, \textit{black-box environment interaction}, to tackle this challenge. A black-box environment is defined by a hidden function that maps a specific set of inputs to outputs. LLMs are required to unravel the hidden function behind the black-box environment by interacting with it in given exploration turns, and reasoning over observed input-output pairs. Leveraging this idea, we build the \textsc{Oracle} benchmark which comprises 6 types of black-box task with 96 black-box environments. 19 modern LLMs are benchmarked. o3, a leading LLM from OpenAI, ranks first in 5 of the 6 tasks, achieving over 70\% accuracy on most easy black-box environments. But it still struggles with some hard black-box tasks, where the average performance drops below 40\%. Further analysis reveals a universal difficulty among LLMs: They lack the high-level planning capability to develop efficient and adaptive exploration strategies for hypothesis refinement. Code is available in https://github.com/lemonsis/Oracle_Benchmark.
title Investigating Advanced Reasoning of Large Language Models via Black-Box Environment Interaction
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19035