Metadata
- Authors: Parshin Shojaee Iman Mirzadeh Keivan Alizadeh Maxwell Horton Samy Bengio Mehrdad Farajtabar
- Full Title:: The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Foundational models,
- URL:: https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf
- Read date:: 2025-06-15
Highlights
Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counterintuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget (View Highlight)
even when we provide the algorithm in the prompt—so that the model only needs to execute the prescribed steps—performance does not improve, and the observed collapse still occurs at roughly the same point (View Highlight)