PBEBench: A Multi-Step Programming by Examples Reasoning Benchmark inspired by Historical Linguistics

Abstract: Recently, long chain of thought (LCoT), LLMs, have taken the machine learning world by storm with their breathtaking reasoning capabilities. However, are the abstract reasoning abilities of these models general enough for problems of practical importance? Unlike past work, which has focused mainly on math, coding, and data wrangling, we focus on a historical linguistics-inspired inductive reasoning problem, formulated as Programming by Examples. We develop a fully automated pipeline for dynamically generating a benchmark for this task with controllable difficulty in order to tackle scalability and contamination issues to which many reasoning benchmarks are subject. Using our pipeline, we generate a test set with nearly 1k instances that is challenging for all state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs, with the best model (Claude-3.7-Sonnet) achieving a mere 54% pass rate, demonstrating that LCoT LLMs still struggle with a class or reasoning that is ubiquitous in historical linguistics as well as many other domains.