LLMs fail multi-step math despite solving each step correctly

OracleLadder diagnostic reveals a composition gap that accounts for 33–48% of failures across six models.

Top University
Zhuohan Wang · Haoran Ma · Tianyu Wu · Yuanlin Duan · Zichun Liao · Jieming Yu

Rutgers University · Harvard University · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Research Digest··2 min read
Wang et al.

The authors built OracleLadder, which uses a teacher model to write a fixed roadmap of intermediate milestones for each problem and a deterministic symbolic verifier to grade answers.

Why this paper

From Harvard University and 2 others · Released code

In one line

LLMs often solve all intermediate math milestones yet fail to combine them into a correct final solution, making composition their largest diagnosed reasoning gap.

What it released

Code

What we could check

  • ✓Code link in the paper (github.com)
  • ·No weights link found
  • ·No dataset link found
  • ·No compute details found
  • ·No stated limitations found
  • ·No benchmark numbers found

Observed from the paper text and links we have. Absence here means we did not find it, not that it does not exist.

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