mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Are LLMs the Master of All Trades? : Exploring Domain-Agnostic Reasoning Skills of LLMs

arXiv 2303.12810 ↗First posted 22 Mar 2023cs.CL cs.AIcited by 7

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation

Abstract (arXiv)

The potential of large language models (LLMs) to reason like humans has been a highly contested topic in Machine Learning communities. However, the reasoning abilities of humans are multifaceted and can be seen in various forms, including analogical, spatial and moral reasoning, among others. This fact raises the question whether LLMs can perform equally well across all these different domains. This research work aims to investigate the performance of LLMs on different reasoning tasks by conducting experiments that directly use or draw inspirations from existing datasets on analogical and spatial reasoning. Additionally, to evaluate the ability of LLMs to reason like human, their performance is evaluted on more open-ended, natural language questions. My findings indicate that LLMs excel at analogical and moral reasoning, yet struggle to perform as proficiently on spatial reasoning tasks. I believe these experiments are crucial for informing the future development of LLMs, particularly in contexts that require diverse reasoning proficiencies. By shedding light on the reasoning abilities of LLMs, this study aims to push forward our understanding of how they can better emulate the cognitive abilities of humans.

Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 3 of its 8 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2023.

Builds on

3 of 8 references.

References · 3

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  3. 2021SpartQA: : A Textual Question Answering Benchmark for Spatial Reasoningcited by 75

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 4; 2025: 1; 2026: 1.

7 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Human-Level Reasoning: A Comparative Study of Large Language Models on Logical and Abstract Reasoning
  2. 2025Position: On the Methodological Pitfalls of Evaluating Base LLMs for Reasoning
  3. 2024Beyond Accuracy: Evaluating the Reasoning Behavior of Large Language Models -- A Survey
  4. 2022Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey
  5. 2025Thinking Machines: A Survey of LLM based Reasoning Strategies
  6. 2025Reasoning Capabilities and Invariability of Large Language Models
  7. 2024LLMs as Models for Analogical Reasoning
  8. 2024Easy Problems That LLMs Get Wrong