Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have transformed the field of
natural language processing (NLP). From GPT-3 to PaLM, the state-of-the-art
performance on natural language tasks is being pushed forward with every new
large language model. Along with natural language abilities, there has been a
significant interest in understanding whether such models exhibit reasoning
capabilities with the use of reasoning benchmarks. However, even though results
are seemingly positive, these benchmarks prove to be simplistic in nature and
the performance of LLMs on these benchmarks cannot be used as evidence to
support, many a times outlandish, claims being made about LLMs' reasoning
capabilities. Further, these only represent a very limited set of simple
reasoning tasks and we need to look at more sophisticated reasoning problems if
we are to measure the true limits of such LLM-based systems. Motivated by this,
we propose an extensible assessment framework to test the capabilities of LLMs
on reasoning about actions and change, a central aspect of human intelligence.
We provide multiple test cases that are more involved than any of the
previously established benchmarks and each test case evaluates a different
aspect of reasoning about actions and change. Results on GPT-3 (davinci),
Instruct-GPT3 (text-davinci-002) and BLOOM (176B), showcase subpar performance
on such reasoning tasks.Comment: An updated version of this work is here: arXiv:2302.06706 Accepted at
Foundation Models for Decision Making Workshop at Neural Information
Processing Systems, 202