Do PhD-level LLMs Truly Grasp Elementary Addition? Probing Rule Learning
  vs. Memorization in Large Language Models
Authors: name: Yang Yan; name: Yu Lu; name: Renjun Xu; name: Zhenzhong Lan
Published: 2025-04-07 16:57:10

Abstract: Despite high benchmark scores, Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail simple
problem, raising a critical question: Do LLMs learn mathematical principles or
merely memorize patterns? Rather than designing increasingly complex benchmarks
like recent works, we investigate this using elementary two-integer addition
(0 to 2^{64}), probing two core properties: commutativity (A+B=B+A) and
compositional generalization (via isomorphic symbolic mappings, e.g., 7
rightarrow y). While state-of-the-art LLMs achieve 73.8-99.8\% accuracy on
numerical addition, performance collapses to leq7.5\% under symbolic
mapping, indicating failure to generalize learned rules. Non-monotonic
performance scaling with digit count and frequent commutativity violations
(over 1,700 cases of A+B neq B+A) further support this. Explicitly providing
addition rules degrades performance by 81.2\% on average, while
self-explanation maintains baseline accuracy, suggesting LLM arithmetic
processing is misaligned with human-defined principles. Our findings indicate
current LLMs rely on memory pattern over genuine rule learning, highlighting
architectural limitations and the need for new approaches to achieve true
mathematical reasoning.