21.9AIJun 20, 2025
Mathematical Proof as a Litmus Test: Revealing Failure Modes of Advanced Large Reasoning ModelsDadi Guo, Jiayu Liu, Zhiyuan Fan et al.
Large reasoning models (e.g., R1, o3) have demonstrated remarkable mathematical problem-solving abilities. However, the high reported accuracy of these advanced models on popular datasets, reliance on purely numerical evaluation and potential benchmark leakage, often masks their true reasoning shortcomings. To address this, we propose leveraging the inherent rigor and methodological complexity of mathematical proofs as a diagnostic tool to expose these hidden failures. Specifically, we introduce the RFMDataset (Reveal Failure Modes), a collection of 200 diverse mathematical proof problems, and thoroughly evaluate advanced models' performance on it. Our in-depth analysis of their failures uncovers 10 fine-grained error types, which shows fundamental limitations in current large reasoning models: 1) large reasoning models grapple profoundly with mathematical proofs, with some generating entirely correct proofs for less than 20% of problems and failing even on basic ones; 2) models exhibit a diverse spectrum of reasoning failures, prominently demonstrating the lack of guarantees for the correctness and rigor of single-step reasoning; and 3) models show hallucination and incompleteness during the reasoning process. Our findings reveal that models' self-reflection is insufficient to resolve the current logical dilemmas, necessitating formalized and fine-grained logical training.
4.5MLNov 26, 2025
Nonconvex Penalized LAD Estimation in Partial Linear Models with DNNs: Asymptotic Analysis and Proximal AlgorithmsLechen Feng, Haoran Li, Lucky Li et al.
This paper investigates the partial linear model by Least Absolute Deviation (LAD) regression. We parameterize the nonparametric term using Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and formulate a penalized LAD problem for estimation. Specifically, our model exhibits the following challenges. First, the regularization term can be nonconvex and nonsmooth, necessitating the introduction of infinite dimensional variational analysis and nonsmooth analysis into the asymptotic normality discussion. Second, our network must expand (in width, sparsity level and depth) as more samples are observed, thereby introducing additional difficulties for theoretical analysis. Third, the oracle of the proposed estimator is itself defined through a ultra high-dimensional, nonconvex, and discontinuous optimization problem, which already entails substantial computational and theoretical challenges. Under such the challenges, we establish the consistency, convergence rate, and asymptotic normality of the estimator. Furthermore, we analyze the oracle problem itself and its continuous relaxation. We study the convergence of a proximal subgradient method for both formulations, highlighting their structural differences lead to distinct computational subproblems along the iterations. In particular, the relaxed formulation admits significantly cheaper proximal updates, reflecting an inherent trade-off between statistical accuracy and computational tractability.
Privacy-Preserved Neural Graph DatabasesQi Hu, Haoran Li, Jiaxin Bai et al.
In the era of large language models (LLMs), efficient and accurate data retrieval has become increasingly crucial for the use of domain-specific or private data in the retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Neural graph databases (NGDBs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm that combines the strengths of graph databases (GDBs) and neural networks to enable efficient storage, retrieval, and analysis of graph-structured data which can be adaptively trained with LLMs. The usage of neural embedding storage and Complex neural logical Query Answering (CQA) provides NGDBs with generalization ability. When the graph is incomplete, by extracting latent patterns and representations, neural graph databases can fill gaps in the graph structure, revealing hidden relationships and enabling accurate query answering. Nevertheless, this capability comes with inherent trade-offs, as it introduces additional privacy risks to the domain-specific or private databases. Malicious attackers can infer more sensitive information in the database using well-designed queries such as from the answer sets of where Turing Award winners born before 1950 and after 1940 lived, the living places of Turing Award winner Hinton are probably exposed, although the living places may have been deleted in the training stage due to the privacy concerns. In this work, we propose a privacy-preserved neural graph database (P-NGDB) framework to alleviate the risks of privacy leakage in NGDBs. We introduce adversarial training techniques in the training stage to enforce the NGDBs to generate indistinguishable answers when queried with private information, enhancing the difficulty of inferring sensitive information through combinations of multiple innocuous queries.