Large language models (LLMs) can solve arithmetic word problems with high accuracy, but little is known about how well they generalize to more complex problems. This is difficult to study, as (i) much of the available evaluation data has already been seen by the most capable models during training, and (ii) existing benchmarks do not capture how problem proofs may be arbitrarily complex in various ways. In this paper, we present a data-generation framework for evaluating LLMs on problems with arbitrarily complex arithmetic proofs, called MathGAP. MathGAP generates problem statements and chain-of-thought reasoning traces according to specifications about their arithmetic proof structure, enabling systematic studies on easy-to-hard generalization with respect to complexity of proof trees. Using MathGAP, we find that LLMs show a significant decrease in performance as proofs get deeper and wider. This effect is more pronounced in complex, nonlinear proof structures, which are challenging even for the most capable models. The models are also sensitive to simple changes in sentence ordering. However, they remain capable of solving some complex problems, suggesting that reasoning generalization is noisy.
View on arXiv@article{opedal2025_2410.13502,
title={ MathGAP: Out-of-Distribution Evaluation on Problems with Arbitrarily Complex Proofs },
author={ Andreas Opedal and Haruki Shirakami and Bernhard Schölkopf and Abulhair Saparov and Mrinmaya Sachan },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.13502},
year={ 2025 }
}