A2RBench: An Automatic Paradigm for Formally Verifiable Abstract Reasoning Benchmark Generation

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

Introduces A2RBench, an automated pipeline for generating formally verifiable abstract reasoning benchmarks for LLMs, using cycle consistency to ensure unique solutions, and reveals that current LLMs underperform humans significantly on 3D reasoning tasks.

Abstract reasoning ability reflects the intelligence and generalization capacity of LLMs to extract and apply abstract rules. However, accurately measuring this ability remains challenging: existing benchmarks either rely on expensive manual annotation, limiting their scale, or risk measuring memorization rather than genuine reasoning. To address this, we introduce an automated pipeline named A2RBench, encompassing generation, expansion, evaluation, and analysis. Specifically, in the generation stage, LLMs create diverse tasks demanding genuine reasoning; in the expansion stage, LLMs reuse validated rules and expand new input spaces to generate task variations, achieving scaling. However, such a process may cause hallucinations. To eliminate it, we further establish a theoretical framework and prove that programmatic verification--testing whether the inverse operation perfectly reverses the forward operation (cycle consistency)--guarantees a unique solution. Through extensive evaluations on mainstream LLMs, we find: (1) Current LLMs exhibit fundamental deficiencies in abstract reasoning, with top models significantly underperforming humans on a representative subset (39.8% vs. 68.5%). (2) Current LLMs fall far short of 2D and 1D in the complexity of generated 3D tasks, revealing their lack of understanding of high-dimensional tasks. (3) Counterintuitively, inputs with higher information complexity can simplify the reasoning process.
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Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2605.17278

Abstract

Large language models demonstrate significant limitations in abstract reasoning abilities compared to human performance, particularly in complex 3D task understanding, while an automated benchmark pipeline shows that programmatic verification ensures solution uniqueness through cycle consistency.

Abstract reasoning abilityreflects the intelligence and generalization capacity of LLMs to extract and apply abstract rules. However, accurately measuring this ability remains challenging: existing benchmarks either rely on expensive manual annotation, limiting their scale, or risk measuring memorization rather than genuine reasoning. To address this, we introduce anautomated pipelinenamed A2RBench, encompassing generation, expansion, evaluation, and analysis. Specifically, in the generation stage, LLMs create diverse tasks demanding genuine reasoning; in the expansion stage, LLMs reuse validated rules and expand new input spaces to generate task variations, achieving scaling. However, such a process may cause hallucinations. To eliminate it, we further establish a theoretical framework and prove thatprogrammatic verification--testing whether theinverse operationperfectly reverses theforward operation(cycle consistency)--guarantees a unique solution. Through extensive evaluations on mainstream LLMs, we find: (1) Current LLMs exhibit fundamental deficiencies in abstract reasoning, with top models significantly underperforming humans on a representative subset (39.8% vs. 68.5%). (2) Current LLMs fall far short of 2D and 1D in the complexity of generated3D tasks, revealing their lack of understanding of high-dimensional tasks. (3) Counterintuitively, inputs with higherinformation complexitycan simplify the reasoning process.

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