Can Large Language Models Reason and Optimize Under Constraints?

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Bernier, Fabien, Ghamizi, Salah, Dogoulis, Pantelis, Cordy, Maxime
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Bernier, Fabien
Ghamizi, Salah
Dogoulis, Pantelis
Cordy, Maxime
author_facet Bernier, Fabien
Ghamizi, Salah
Dogoulis, Pantelis
Cordy, Maxime
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great capabilities across diverse natural language tasks; yet their ability to solve abstraction and optimization problems with constraints remains scarcely explored. In this paper, we investigate whether LLMs can reason and optimize under the physical and operational constraints of Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problem. We introduce a challenging evaluation setup that requires a set of fundamental skills such as reasoning, structured input handling, arithmetic, and constrained optimization. Our evaluation reveals that SoTA LLMs fail in most of the tasks, and that reasoning LLMs still fail in the most complex settings. Our findings highlight critical gaps in LLMs' ability to handle structured reasoning under constraints, and this work provides a rigorous testing environment for developing more capable LLM assistants that can tackle real-world power grid optimization problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_23004
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can Large Language Models Reason and Optimize Under Constraints?
Bernier, Fabien
Ghamizi, Salah
Dogoulis, Pantelis
Cordy, Maxime
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great capabilities across diverse natural language tasks; yet their ability to solve abstraction and optimization problems with constraints remains scarcely explored. In this paper, we investigate whether LLMs can reason and optimize under the physical and operational constraints of Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problem. We introduce a challenging evaluation setup that requires a set of fundamental skills such as reasoning, structured input handling, arithmetic, and constrained optimization. Our evaluation reveals that SoTA LLMs fail in most of the tasks, and that reasoning LLMs still fail in the most complex settings. Our findings highlight critical gaps in LLMs' ability to handle structured reasoning under constraints, and this work provides a rigorous testing environment for developing more capable LLM assistants that can tackle real-world power grid optimization problems.
title Can Large Language Models Reason and Optimize Under Constraints?
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23004