Step-by-Step Reasoning to Solve Grid Puzzles: Where do LLMs Falter?

Nemika Tyagi, Mihir Parmar, Mohith Kulkarni, Aswin Rrv, Nisarg Patel, Mutsumi Nakamura, Arindam Mitra, Chitta Baral


Abstract
Solving grid puzzles involves a significant amount of logical reasoning. Hence, it is a good domain to evaluate reasoning capability of a model which can then guide us to improve the reasoning ability of models. However, most existing works evaluate only the final predicted answer of a puzzle, without delving into an in-depth analysis of the LLMs’ reasoning chains (such as where they falter) or providing any finer metrics to evaluate them. Since LLMs may rely on simple heuristics or artifacts to predict the final answer, it is crucial to evaluate the generated reasoning chain beyond overall correctness measures, for accurately evaluating the reasoning abilities of LLMs. To this end, we first develop GridPuzzle, an evaluation dataset comprising of 274 grid-based puzzles with different complexities. Second, we propose a new error taxonomy derived from manual analysis of reasoning chains from LLMs including GPT-4, Claude-3, Gemini, Mistral, and Llama-2. Then, we develop a LLM-based framework for large-scale subjective evaluation (i.e., identifying errors) and an objective metric, PuzzleEval, to evaluate the correctness of reasoning chains. Evaluating reasoning chains from LLMs leads to several interesting findings. We further show that existing prompting methods used for enhancing models’ reasoning abilities do not improve performance on GridPuzzle. This highlights the importance of understanding fine-grained errors and presents a challenge for future research to enhance LLMs’ puzzle-solving abilities by developing methods that address these errors.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.1111
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
19898–19915
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1111
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.1111
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nemika Tyagi, Mihir Parmar, Mohith Kulkarni, Aswin Rrv, Nisarg Patel, Mutsumi Nakamura, Arindam Mitra, and Chitta Baral. 2024. Step-by-Step Reasoning to Solve Grid Puzzles: Where do LLMs Falter?. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 19898–19915, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Step-by-Step Reasoning to Solve Grid Puzzles: Where do LLMs Falter? (Tyagi et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1111.pdf