Large Language Models Are Not Strong Abstract Reasoners

Abstract: LLMs have shown tremendous performance on a large variety of natural language processing tasks, ranging from text comprehension to common sense reasoning. However, the mechanisms responsible for this success remain opaque, and it is unclear whether LLMs can achieve human-like cognitive capabilities or whether these models are still fundamentally circumscribed. Abstract reasoning is a fundamental task for cognition, consisting of finding and applying a general pattern from few data. Evaluating deep neural architectures on this task could give insight into their potential limitations regarding reasoning and their broad generalisation abilities, yet this is currently an under-explored area. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark for evaluating LLMs beyond memorization on abstract reasoning tasks. We perform extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art LLMs, showing that they currently achieve very limited performance in contrast with other natural language tasks, even when applying techniques that have been shown to improve performance on other NLP tasks. We argue that guiding LLM generation to follow causal paths could help improve the generalisation and reasoning abilities of LLMs.