VCSearch: Bridging the Gap Between Well-Defined and Ill-Defined Problems in Mathematical Reasoning

LAMDA Group, Nanjing University
EMNLP 25

*Equal Contribution
Corresponding author

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on reasoning tasks, including mathematical reasoning. However, the current evaluation mostly focuses on carefully constructed benchmarks and neglects the consideration of real-world reasoning problems that present missing or contradictory conditions, known as ill-defined problems. To further study this problem, we develop a large-scale benchmark called Problems with Missing and Contradictory conditions (PMC) containing over 5,000 validated ill-defined mathematical problems. Our preliminary experiments through \benchmark reveal two challenges about existing methods: (1) traditional methods exhibit a trade-off between solving accuracy and rejection capabilities, and (2) formal methods struggle with modeling complex problems. To address these challenges, We develop Variable-Constraint Search (VCSearch), a training-free framework that leverages formal language to detect ill-defined problems, where a variable-constraint pair search strategy is incorporated to improve the modeling capability of formal language. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VCSearch improves the accuracy of identifying unsolvable problems by at least 12% across different LLMs, thus achieving stronger robust mathematical reasoning ability.

Benchmark

Banner

Although existing studies have improved the performance of LLMs on well-defined mathematical benchmarks, they often overlook a critical challenge in real-world applications: the ability to reject ill-defined problems. These problems, which contain missing or contradictory conditions, are particularly common in educational settings. (Examples in PMC)

Method

Traditional methods suffer from a trade-off between problem-solving capability and rejection ability.
To mitigate the trade-off between solving accuracy and rejection capability, a natural idea is to incorporate formal solvers.

Banner

However, modeling mathematical problems with formal language accurately is not trivial.
We first propose a Variable-Constraint Dynamic Search (VCSearch) that systematically discovers new variables and constraints through an iterative searching process consisting of three steps: Preparation, Exploration, and Verification.

BibTeX

@article{tian2024vc,
        title={VC Search: Bridging the Gap Between Well-Defined and Ill-Defined Problems in Mathematical Reasoning},
        author={Tian, Shi-Yu and Zhou, Zhi and Yu, Kun-Yang and Yang, Ming and Jia, Lin-Han and Guo, Lan-Zhe and Li, Yu-Feng},
        journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.05055},
        year={2024}
        }