Zack Gottesman

Mingtian Tan, Mike A. Merrill, Zack Gottesman et al.

Time series data measure how environments change over time and drive decision-making in critical domains like finance and healthcare. A common goal in analyzing time series data is to understand the underlying events that cause the observed variations. We conduct the first study of whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can infer events described with natural language from time series data. We evaluate 18 LLMs on a task to match event sequences with real-valued time series data using a new benchmark we develop using sports data. Several current LLMs demonstrate promising abilities, with OpenAI's o1 performing the best but with DS-R1-distill-Qwen-32B outperforming proprietary models such as GPT-4o. From insights derived from analyzing reasoning failures, we also find clear avenues to improve performance. By applying post-training optimizations, i.e., distillation and self-improvement, we significantly enhance the performance of the Qwen2.5 1.5B, achieving results second only to o1. All resources needed to reproduce our work are available: https://github.com/BennyTMT/GAMETime

Bryan R. Christ, Zack Gottesman, Jonathan Kropko et al.

Math reasoning is an active area of Large Language Model (LLM) research because it is a hallmark of artificial intelligence and has implications in several domains, including math education. However, few works have explored how math reasoning is encoded within LLM parameters and if it is a skill that can be isolated within models. Doing so could allow targeted intervention to improve math performance without altering non-math behavior and foster understanding of how models encode math reasoning. We introduce Math Neurosurgery (MathNeuro), a computationally efficient method we use to isolate math-specific parameters in LLMs using only forward passes. MathNeuro builds on existing work by using weights and activations to calculate parameter importance, but isolates math-specific parameters by filtering out those important for general language tasks. Through pruning parameters MathNeuro identifies, we delete a LLM's math reasoning ability without significantly impacting its general language ability. Scaling the identified parameters by a small constant improves a pretrained or instruction-tuned LLM's performance by 4-17% on GSM8K and 5-35% on MATH while leaving non-math behavior unaltered. MathNeuro is also data efficient: most of its effectiveness holds when identifying math-specific parameters using a single sample. MathNeuro highlights the potential for future work to intervene on math-specific parameters.