TLDR; By carefully designing a reasoning benchmark that counteracts memorization skills in LLMs, LingOly-TOO (L2) Benchmark challenges frontier models with unseen questions and answers and makes the case that LLMs are not consistent reasoning machines yet.

Links: Paper - Leaderboard - Dataset

Figure 1: LingOly-TOO Benchmark results from the paper. Unobfuscated scores are in light orange and obfuscated scores in dark orange.

Do recently announced LLMs reason?

By the time this post was published, a new wave of frontier models had been announced including ones specifically designed to reason using Inference Time Compute (ITC) ^[1]. Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, OpenAI’s o1, o3 and GPT 4.5 models, DeepSeek’s R1 and others demonstrate impressive performance on several reasoning tasks that only few months ago were considered far from solvable^[2]^[3]^[4]. This, rightfully, ignited conversations about an important question: Have we finally reached the era were models can do advanced reasoning?

The need for an unbiased evaluation of reasoning

A standard framework to answer such a question in the NLP domain is to use evaluation benchmarks that tests various reasoning skills via tasks which require a model to apply several sequential reasoning steps to reach the correct answer. The key to this approach is to select tasks and test cases that models have not had prior exposure to. This, in the era of LLMs, has proven to be a major challenge. In part because of the massive scale of training datasets which consists of trillions of words used in developing these models, but also because several of the frontier models are proprietary with little to no information about used training dataset that is available for the research community to take into account in their assessments. This consequently complicates objective evaluation of reasoning skills in LLMs. It also raises concerns that we might be over-estimating their capabilities in advanced reasoning.

LingOly-TOO (L2) Benchmark

To address this, we need reasoning benchmarks with stronger guarantees that the chance of prior data exposure is minimal. This is exactly what our new benchmark LingOly-TOO targets. By extending an already challenging benchmark LingOly^[5] which utilize low-resource languages taken from the UKLO Linguistics Olympiad, LingOly-TOO rewrites key parts of questions and answers to minimize...

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