Conditions for Length Generalization in Learning Reasoning Skills

Abstract

Reasoning is a fundamental capability of AI agents. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities to perform reasoning tasks. However, numerous evaluations of the reasoning capabilities of LLMs have also showed some limitations. An outstanding limitation is length generalization, meaning that when trained on reasoning problems of smaller lengths or sizes, the resulting models struggle with problems of larger sizes or lengths. This potentially indicates some theoretical limitations of generalization in learning reasoning skills. These evaluations and their observations motivated us to perform a theoretical study of the length generalization problem. This work focuses on reasoning tasks that can be formulated as Markov dynamic processes (MDPs) and/or directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). It identifies and proves conditions that decide whether the length generalization problem can be solved or not for a reasoning task in a particular representation. Experiments are also conducted to verify the theoretical results.