Do Large Language Models Understand Logic or Just Mimick Context?
Junbing Yan Chengyu Wang Jun Huang Wei Zhang
Over the past few years, the abilities of large language models (LLMs) have
received extensive attention, which have performed exceptionally well in
complicated scenarios such as logical reasoning and symbolic inference. A
significant factor contributing to this progress is the benefit of in-context
learning and few-shot prompting. However, the reasons behind the success of
such models using contextual reasoning have not been fully explored. Do LLMs
have understand logical rules to draw inferences, or do they ``guess'' the
answers by learning a type of probabilistic mapping through context? This paper
investigates the reasoning capabilities of LLMs on two logical reasoning
datasets by using counterfactual methods to replace context text and modify
logical concepts. Based on our analysis, it is found that LLMs do not truly
understand logical rules; rather, in-context learning has simply enhanced the
likelihood of these models arriving at the correct answers. If one alters
certain words in the context text or changes the concepts of logical terms, the
outputs of LLMs can be significantly disrupted, leading to counter-intuitive
responses. This work provides critical insights into the limitations of LLMs,
underscoring the need for more robust mechanisms to ensure reliable logical
reasoning in LLMs.