Diagnosing LLM Math Reasoning: Discovery Is the Bottleneck, and It's Fixable
TexasAMUniversity · hf · 2026-10-06
Texas A&M researchers systematically probe whether LLMs possess the structural mathematical understanding underlying their solutions.
- Primitives and benchmark: They introduce "Mathematical Primitives" and a benchmark evaluating reasoning along four dimensions—Discovery, Generation, Digestion, Execution.
- Findings: Solution accuracy masks distinct capability profiles; primitives unlock substantial latent execution capacity; and Discovery is the dominant bottleneck in mathematical reasoning.
- Repair: Discovery-limited failures are particularly amenable to fix. They propose a primitive-privileged self-distillation framework that selectively transfers primitive-guided reasoning into a student model, consistently improving math reasoning across model scales and benchmarks.
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