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Abstract - Empirical Evidence of Complexity-Induced Limits in Large Language Models on Finite Discrete State-Space Problems with Explicit Validity Constraints
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly described as possessing strong reasoning capabilities, supported by high performance on mathematical, logical, and planning benchmarks. However, most existing evaluations rely on aggregate accuracy over fixed datasets, obscuring how reasoning behavior evolves as task complexity increases. In this work, we introduce a controlled benchmarking framework to systematically evaluate the robustness of reasoning in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) under progressively increasing problem complexity. We construct a suite of nine classical reasoning tasks: Boolean Satisfiability, Cryptarithmetic, Graph Coloring, River Crossing, Tower of Hanoi, Water Jug, Checker Jumping, Sudoku, and Rubik's Cube, each parameterized to precisely control complexity while preserving underlying semantics. Using deterministic validators, we evaluate multiple open and proprietary LRMs across low, intermediate, and high complexity regimes, ensuring that only fully valid solutions are accepted. Our results reveal a consistent phase transition like behavior: models achieve high accuracy at low complexity but degrade sharply beyond task specific complexity thresholds. We formalize this phenomenon as reasoning collapse. Across tasks, we observe substantial accuracy declines, often exceeding 50%, accompanied by inconsistent reasoning traces, constraint violations, loss of state tracking, and confidently incorrect outputs. Increased reasoning length does not reliably improve correctness, and gains in one problem family do not generalize to others. These findings highlight the need for evaluation methodologies that move beyond static benchmarks and explicitly measure reasoning robustness under controlled complexity.
大型语言模型在具有明确有效性约束的有限离散状态空间问题上复杂性诱发极限的实证证据 /
Empirical Evidence of Complexity-Induced Limits in Large Language Models on Finite Discrete State-Space Problems with Explicit Validity Constraints
1️⃣ 一句话总结
这项研究发现,尽管大型语言模型在简单推理任务上表现出色,但当任务复杂度超过特定阈值时,其推理能力会急剧下降,产生大量错误且自信的错误答案,揭示了当前模型推理能力的脆弱性和局限性。