Large Language and Reasoning Models are Shallow Disjunctive Reasoners

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23487v2
• Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2025 17:37:39 GMT
• Title: Large Language and Reasoning Models are Shallow Disjunctive Reasoners
• Authors: Irtaza Khalid, Amir Masoud Nourollah, Steven Schockaert,
• Abstract summary: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been found to struggle with systematic reasoning.<n>This paper focuses on tasks that require systematic relational composition for qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning.<n>We find that, zero-shot LRMs generally outperform their LLM counterparts in single-path reasoning tasks but struggle in the multi-path setting.
• Score: 15.56445409535547
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been found to struggle with systematic reasoning. Even on tasks where they appear to perform well, their performance often depends on shortcuts, rather than on genuine reasoning abilities, leading them to collapse on out-of-distribution (OOD) examples. Post-training strategies based on reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought prompting have recently been hailed as a step change. However, little is known about the potential of the resulting ``Large Reasoning Models'' (LRMs) beyond maths and programming-based problem solving, where genuine OOD problems can be sparse. In this paper, we focus on tasks that require systematic relational composition for qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning. The setting allows fine control over problem difficulty to precisely measure OOD generalization. We find that, zero-shot LRMs generally outperform their LLM counterparts in single-path reasoning tasks but struggle in the multi-path setting. Whilst showing comparatively better results, fine-tuned LLMs are also not capable of multi-path generalization. We also provide evidence for the behavioral interpretation for this, i.e., that LRMs are shallow disjunctive reasoners.

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