Laying the Foundation First? Investigating the Generalization from Atomic Skills to Complex Reasoning Tasks

arXiv:2403.09479v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Current language models have demonstrated their capability to develop basic reasoning, but struggle in more complicated reasoning tasks that require a combination of atomic skills, such as math word problem requiring skills like arithmetic and unit conversion. Previous methods either do not improve the inherent atomic skills of models or not attempt to generalize the atomic skills to complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we first propose a probing framework to investigate whether the atomic …

abstract arxiv basic capability combination conversion cs.lg current foundation language language models math reasoning skills struggle tasks type word