Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models: Benchmarks, Architectures, Evaluation, and Open Challenges

Abstract

Mathematical reasoning is essential for problem-solving in education, science, and industry, serving as a crucial benchmark for evaluating artificial intelligence systems. As Large Language Models (LLMs) improve their reasoning capabilities, understanding how well they perform mathematical reasoning has become increasingly important. This survey synthesizes recent advancements in mathematical reasoning with LLMs through a structured analysis of datasets, architectures, training strategies, and evaluation protocols. Our systematic review encompasses approximately 120 peer-reviewed studies and preprints, examining the evolution of this research area and providing a unified analytical framework to understand current progress and limitations. Our study particularly introduces a unified taxonomy of mathematical datasets, distinguishing between pretraining corpora, supervised fine-tuning resources, and evaluation benchmarks across varying levels of reasoning complexity. A systematic analysis of reasoning architectures and training strategies, including tool integration, verifier-guided reasoning, and parameter-efficient adaptation, is presented to assess their effects on reasoning robustness and generalization. Moreover, a comparative evaluation of existing metrics highlights the gap between final-answer accuracy and process-level reasoning verification. By synthesizing insights across these areas, our analysis identifies recurring failure modes, such as reasoning faithfulness issues, benchmark biases, and generalization limitations, and outlines key research directions toward improving symbolic grounding, evaluation reliability, and the development of more robust and trustworthy LLM-based reasoning systems.