arXiv:2607. 20520v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on mathematical problem solving, yet prior work often treats representationally equivalent formulations as interchangeable and conflates reasoning errors with interface failures.
By Sagnik Nath, Edith Aurora Graf, Liang Zhang, Diego Zapata-Rivera
arXiv:2510.00628v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large audio-language models (LALMs) are often used in tasks that involve reasoning over ordered options. An open question is whether their pr...
By Yu-Xiang Lin, Chen-An Li, Sheng-Lun Wei, Po-Chun Chen, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Hung-yi Lee
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) organize reasoning operations—such as problem formulation, goal decomposition, and deduction—within their hidden representation spaces. It shows that these operations are separable in held‑out representations, with peak separability in middle layers, and that token‑wise alignment of operations becomes more distributed across spans as layers deepen. Attention‑masking experiments reveal that representations aligned to operations at chunk onsets depend on prior reasoning context, indicating a geometric correspondence between linguistic reasoning expressions and internal model structure.
By Seogyeong Jeong, Jaehui Hwang, Dongyoon Han, Geonmo Gu, Alice Oh, Taekyung Kim
The paper introduces a benchmark of 3,600 exact‑rational word problems and 8,600 prompts that test whether language models give the same canonical answer when the same quantity is expressed in different numeric forms (decimal, fraction, percentage, number word, scientific notation, or unit‑converted). After normalizing answer syntax, canonical accuracy is high (0.969–0.996), but correctness across equivalent representations drops to 0.848–0.981, revealing that many errors stem from the evaluator’s number grammar rather than the models’ reasoning. The study also finds that representation consensus does not outperform paraphrase consensus on low‑error subsets and that certain models (e.g., Mistral Small 4) exhibit systematic unit‑conversion errors.
By Ephraim Atta-Duncan
The study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can generalize arithmetic reasoning across different input formats, such as numeric and verbal expressions in English, Spanish, and Italian. By using attribution patching, the researchers identified the specific internal circuits each model employs for numeric versus verbal arithmetic tasks. They found that the degree of overlap between a model’s numeric circuit and its verbal circuit predicts how well the model generalizes to verbal formats, explaining variations in performance across languages and formats without requiring labeled data.
By Andrea Gregor de Varda, Sana Pandey, Pengrui Han, Jacob Andreas, Evelina Fedorenko
The paper investigates the so‑called ‘structure tax’ that is often attributed to constraining large language model outputs to structured formats like JSON or XML. By evaluating various models, datasets, and schema designs, the authors find that the accuracy loss depends more on how the schema is organized than on the presence of structure itself. Specifically, reasoning‑first field ordering can match or surpass free‑form accuracy, whereas answer‑first ordering leads to significant drops, especially in smaller models. The study also shows that well‑designed schemas improve confidence calibration and the separability of correct versus incorrect representations in transformer layers.
By Vineet Kumar, Kanishka, Bhuvanesh Mandora