Toward Automated Robustness Evaluation of Mathematical Reasoning

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Authors: Y. Thomas Hou, Zhongyu Xiao, Fei Yu, Yihan Jiang, Ma Shuguang, Zhaoqian Dai, Hailiang Huang, Guanhua Chen, Guanhua Chen
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various reasoning-intensive tasks.However, these models exhibit unexpected brittleness, often failing on simple variations of the same underlying task.Existing robustness evaluations predominantly rely on hand-crafted templates or a limited set of perturbation rules.Consequently, such approaches lack the adaptability to probe latent vulnerabilities unique to specific models and remain susceptible to data contamination.To address this, we propose the Math Stress Tester (MASTER), an automated framework inspired by software stress testing.MAS-TER generates adversarial variants via a multiround rewrite-verify loop, ensuring semantic consistency while successfully inducing model failure.Our framework generates benchmark variants dynamically for each LLM, thus minimizing the risk of data contamination.Experiments on GSM8K and MATH-500 demonstrate the effectiveness of MASTER on mathematical tasks.Additionally, we validate the framework's extensibility to non-mathematical tasks, highlighting its broad applicability.Furthermore, we demonstrate that the synthesized variants generated by MASTER can be utilized as a fine-tuning dataset to significantly enhance the model's robustness.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Topic Modeling Machine Learning in Materials Science Natural Language Processing Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Pages
14117–14139
Publication date
1 January 2026
Language
EN