DEVAL: A Framework for Evaluating and Improving the Derivation Capability of Large Language Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces DEVAL, a framework to evaluate and enhance the derivation reasoning capabilities of large language models, revealing their limitations and proposing a prompt engineering method to improve their reasoning performance.

Contribution

The paper formally defines Derivation Relation (DR) and Derivation Capability (DC), and presents DEVAL, a systematic evaluation framework along with Derivation Prompting (DP) to improve LLM reasoning.

Findings

LLMs show moderate DR recognition but struggle in problem-solving scenarios.

DEVAL effectively evaluates derivation reasoning across multiple tasks.

Derivation Prompting improves DC by an average of 15.2%.

Abstract

Assessing the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) over data remains an open and pressing research question. Compared with LLMs, human reasoning can derive corresponding modifications to the output based on certain kinds of changes to the input. This reasoning pattern, which relies on abstract rules that govern relationships between changes of data, has not been comprehensively described or evaluated in LLMs. In this paper, we formally define this reasoning pattern as the Derivation Relation (DR) and introduce the concept of Derivation Capability (DC), i.e. applying DR by making the corresponding modification to the output whenever the input takes certain changes. To assess DC, a systematically constructed evaluation framework named DEVAL is proposed and used to evaluate five popular LLMs and one Large Reasoning Model in seven mainstream tasks. The evaluation results show that mainstream LLMs, such as GPT-4o and Claude3.5, exhibit moderate DR recognition capabilities but reveal significant drop-offs on applying DR effectively in problem-solving scenarios. To improve this, we propose a novel prompt engineering approach called Derivation Prompting (DP). It achieves an average improvement of 15.2% in DC for all tested LLMs, outperforming commonly used prompt engineering techniques.