mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

GSM-Infinite: How Do Your LLMs Behave over Infinitely Increasing Context Length and Reasoning Complexity?

arXiv 2502.05252 ↗First posted 7 Feb 2025cs.CL cs.AIcited by 16

On the map: LLM reasoning → Mathematical reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Long-context large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong performance in information retrieval and long-document QA. However, to tackle the most challenging intellectual problems, LLMs must reason effectively in long and complex contexts (e.g., frontier mathematical research). Studying how LLMs handle increasing reasoning complexity and context length is essential, yet existing benchmarks lack a solid basis for quantitative evaluation. Inspired by the abstraction of GSM-8K problems as computational graphs, and the ability to introduce noise by adding unnecessary nodes and edges, we develop a grade school math problem generator capable of producing arithmetic problems with infinite difficulty and context length under fine-grained control. Using our newly synthesized GSM-Infinite benchmark, we comprehensively evaluate existing LLMs. We find a consistent sigmoid decline in reasoning performance as complexity increases, along with a systematic inference scaling trend: exponentially increasing inference computation yields only linear performance gains. These findings underscore the fundamental limitations of current long-context LLMs and the key challenges in scaling reasoning capabilities. Our GSM-Infinite benchmark provides a scalable and controllable testbed for systematically studying and advancing LLM reasoning in long and complex contexts.

Key facts. Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Mathematical reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 31 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Feb 2025.

Builds on

31 of 41 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models7 Oct
  2. 2024Physics of Language Models: Part 2.2, How to Learn From Mistakes on Grade-School Math Problems29 Aug
  3. 2024Physics of Language Models: Part 2.1, Grade-School Math and the Hidden Reasoning Process29 Jul

Other references · 28

  1. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,192
  2. 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,743
  3. 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,160
  4. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
  5. 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,203
  6. 2024Qwen2.5 Technical Reportcited by 4,713
  7. 2023Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contextscited by 3,383
  8. 2020Longformer: The Long-Document Transformercited by 3,362
  9. 2024Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of contextcited by 3,175
  10. 2023Mistral 7Bcited by 3,065
  11. 2024Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameterscited by 1,928
  12. 2023LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understandingcited by 1,378
16 more
  1. 2024RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?cited by 1,270
  2. 2024Large Language Monkeys: Scaling Inference Compute with Repeated Samplingcited by 946
  3. 2023Active Retrieval Augmented Generationcited by 506
  4. 2023Ring Attention with Blockwise Transformers for Near-Infinite Contextcited by 448
  5. 2024LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitaskscited by 367
  6. 2024∞Bench: Extending Long Context Evaluation Beyond 100K Tokenscited by 360
  7. 2022Neural Networks and the Chomsky Hierarchycited by 214
  8. 2024BABILong: Testing the Limits of LLMs with Long Context Reasoning-in-a-Haystackcited by 211
  9. 2025MiniMax-01: Scaling Foundation Models with Lightning Attentioncited by 157
  10. 2024Same Task, More Tokens: the Impact of Input Length on the Reasoning Performance of Large Language Modelscited by 150
  11. 2024DafnyBench: A Benchmark for Formal Software Verificationcited by 54
  12. 2024Can Long-Context Language Models Subsume Retrieval, RAG, SQL, and More?cited by 53
  13. 2024In Defense of RAG in the Era of Long-Context Language Modelscited by 52
  14. 2024Jamba-1.5: Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Models at Scalecited by 48
  15. 2024Long Context vs. RAG for LLMs: An Evaluation and Revisitscited by 24
  16. 2024Tree Attention: Topology-aware Decoding for Long-Context Attention on GPU clusterscited by 13

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 13; 2026: 3.

16 papers.

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  1. 2025Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Modelscited by 381
  2. 2025Hilbert: Recursively Building Formal Proofs with Informal Reasoningcited by 55
  3. 2025OMEGA: Can LLMs Reason Outside the Box in Math? Evaluating Exploratory, Compositional, and Transformative Generalizationcited by 48
  4. 2025How Is LLM Reasoning Distracted by Irrelevant Context? An Analysis Using a Controlled Benchmarkcited by 26
  5. 2025Multipole Attention for Efficient Long Context Reasoningcited by 14
  6. 2025h1: Bootstrapping LLMs to Reason over Longer Horizons via Reinforcement Learningcited by 8
  7. 2025Toward Automated Robustness Evaluation of Mathematical Reasoningcited by 6
  8. 2025L0-Reasoning Bench: Evaluating Procedural Correctness in Language Models via Simple Program Executioncited by 5
  9. 2026LongCoT: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Chain-of-Thought Reasoningcited by 5
  10. 2025LongReasonArena: A Long Reasoning Benchmark for Large Language Modelscited by 3
  11. 2025CogniLoad: A Synthetic Natural Language Reasoning Benchmark With Tunable Length, Intrinsic Difficulty, and Distractor Densitycited by 3
  12. 2025Stop Before You Fail: Operational Capability Boundaries for Mitigating Unproductive Reasoning in Large Reasoning Modelscited by 3
4 more
  1. 2025The Illusion of Procedural Reasoning: Measuring Long-Horizon FSM Execution in LLMscited by 3
  2. 2025Bridging Reasoning to Learning: Unmasking Illusions using Complexity Out of Distribution Generalizationcited by 1
  3. 2026Probing How Scalable Table Data Enhances General Long-Context Reasoningcited by 1
  4. 2026PhantomEnvironments: Training LLM Agents in Fictional Worldscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024MathHay: An Automated Benchmark for Long-Context Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs
  2. 2025Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models: Assessing Logical and Arithmetic Errors across Wide Numerical Ranges
  3. 2025Reasoning Effort and Problem Complexity: A Scaling Analysis in LLMs
  4. 2025Scalable Complexity Control Facilitates Reasoning Ability of LLMs
  5. 2024Inference Scaling vs Reasoning: An Empirical Analysis of Compute-Optimal LLM Problem-Solving
  6. 2024Are Your LLMs Capable of Stable Reasoning?
  7. 2024Assessing the Emergent Symbolic Reasoning Abilities of Llama Large Language Models
  8. 2025Do LLMs Overthink Basic Math Reasoning? Benchmarking the Accuracy-Efficiency Tradeoff in Language Models