SoS1: O1 and R1-Like Reasoning LLMs are Sum-of-Square Solvers
Authors: name: Kechen Li; name: Wenqi Zhu; name: Coralia Cartis; name: Tianbo Ji; name: Shiwei Liu
Published: 2025-02-27 21:41:43

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved human-level proficiency across
diverse tasks, but their ability to perform rigorous mathematical problem
solving remains an open challenge. In this work, we investigate a fundamental
yet computationally intractable problem: determining whether a given
multivariate polynomial is nonnegative. This problem, closely related to
Hilbert's Seventeenth Problem, plays a crucial role in global polynomial
optimization and has applications in various fields. First, we introduce
SoS-1K, a meticulously curated dataset of approximately 1,000 polynomials,
along with expert-designed reasoning instructions based on five progressively
challenging criteria. Evaluating multiple state-of-the-art LLMs, we find that
without structured guidance, all models perform only slightly above the random
guess baseline 50%. However, high-quality reasoning instructions significantly
improve accuracy, boosting performance up to 81%. Furthermore, our 7B model,
SoS-7B, fine-tuned on SoS-1K for just 4 hours, outperforms the 671B DeepSeek-V3
and GPT-4o-mini in accuracy while only requiring 1.8% and 5% of the computation
time needed for letters, respectively. Our findings highlight the potential of
LLMs to push the boundaries of mathematical reasoning and tackle NP-hard
problems.