The Stochastic Parrot on LLM's Shoulder: A Summative Assessment of
  Physical Concept Understanding
Authors: name: Mo Yu; name: Lemao Liu; name: Junjie Wu; name: Tsz Ting Chung; name: Shunchi Zhang; name: Jiangnan Li; name: Dit-Yan Yeung; name: Jie Zhou
Published: 2025-02-13 04:00:03

Abstract: In a systematic way, we investigate a widely asked question: Do LLMs really
understand what they say?, which relates to the more familiar term Stochastic
Parrot. To this end, we propose a summative assessment over a carefully
designed physical concept understanding task, PhysiCo. Our task alleviates the
memorization issue via the usage of grid-format inputs that abstractly describe
physical phenomena. The grids represents varying levels of understanding, from
the core phenomenon, application examples to analogies to other abstract
patterns in the grid world. A comprehensive study on our task demonstrates: (1)
state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4o, o1 and Gemini 2.0 flash thinking, lag
behind humans by ~40%; (2) the stochastic parrot phenomenon is present in LLMs,
as they fail on our grid task but can describe and recognize the same concepts
well in natural language; (3) our task challenges the LLMs due to intrinsic
difficulties rather than the unfamiliar grid format, as in-context learning and
fine-tuning on same formatted data added little to their performance.