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

AbstractThe rapid escalation from elementary school-level to frontier problems of the difficulty for LLM benchmarks in recent years seems to bring us close enough to the “last exam” for LLMs to surpass humanity. However, is the LLMs’ remarkable reasoning ability indeed coming from true intelligence by human standards, or are they actually 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 percent performance loss on elementary school-level arithmetic and reasoning problems. Such findings are a wake-up call to the LLM community that compels us to reevaluate the true intelligence level of cutting-edge LLMs.