Recitation over Reasoning: How Cutting-Edge Language Models Can Fail on Elementary School-Level Reasoning Problems?

ABSTRACT

The rapid escalation from elementary school-level to frontier problems of the difficulty for LLM benchmarks in recent years have weaved a miracle for researchers that we are only inches away from surpassing human intelligence. However, is the LLMs' remarkable reasoning ability indeed comes from true intelligence by human standards, or are they simply reciting solutions witnessed during training at an Internet level? To study this problem, we propose RoR-Bench, a novel, multi-modal benchmark for detecting LLM's recitation behavior when asked simple reasoning problems but with conditions subtly shifted, and conduct empirical analysis on our benchmark. Surprisingly, we found existing cutting-edge LLMs unanimously exhibits extremely severe recitation behavior; by changing one phrase in the condition, top models such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 can suffer 60%.

AUTHORS

Kai Yan, Yufei Xu, Zhengyin Du, Xuesong Yao, Zheyu Wang, Xiaowen Guo, Jiecao Chen