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LLMs struggle with multi-hop reasoning due to pretraining limitations, study finds

A new research paper published on arXiv explores the limitations of large language models (LLMs) in performing multi-hop reasoning. The study, "Multi-Hop Knowledge Composition is Bound by Pretraining Exposure," demonstrates that LLMs struggle with complex reasoning tasks even when individual facts are known and retrievable. Researchers found that this failure is rooted in the pretraining phase, as models exposed to compositional contexts during training performed better on unseen compositional questions, while those not exposed continued to fail. AI

IMPACT Highlights a fundamental limitation in LLM reasoning capabilities, suggesting pretraining data composition is key for complex problem-solving.

RANK_REASON Research paper detailing limitations of LLMs in multi-hop reasoning. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on arXiv cs.CL →

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LLMs struggle with multi-hop reasoning due to pretraining limitations, study finds

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Research paper detailing limitations of LLMs in multi-hop reasoning. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Yannis Karmim, Luis Marti, Djam\'e Seddah, Valentin Barri\`ere ·

    Multi-Hop Knowledge Composition is Bound by Pretraining Exposure

    arXiv:2606.09338v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models fail at implicit multi-hop reasoning: a model answers "When was $X$ born?" and "Who is $Y$'s closest friend?" correctly but fails on "When was $Y$'s closest friend born?" in a single forward pass, even when…