Too long; didn't solve
On the map: LLM reasoning → Mathematical reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
Mathematical benchmarks consisting of a range of mathematics problems are widely used to evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models, yet little is known about how their structural properties influence model behaviour. In this work, we investigate two structural length variables, prompt length and solution length, and analyse how they relate to model performance on a newly constructed adversarial dataset of expert-authored mathematics problems. We find that both prompt and solution lengths correlate positively with increased model failure across models. We also include a secondary, exploratory analysis of cross-model disagreement. Under a difficulty-adjusted normalised analysis, both variables retain weak negative associations with realised model separation, slightly stronger for prompt length. Overall, our main robust finding is that structural length is linked to empirical difficulty in this dataset.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Mathematical reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 13 of its 21 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2026.
Builds on
13 of 21 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2025MathArena: Evaluating LLMs on Uncontaminated Math Competitions29 May
- 2025Proof or Bluff? Evaluating LLMs on 2025 USA Math Olympiad27 Mar
Other references · 11
- 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,743
- 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,203
- 2023Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contextscited by 3,383
- 2023MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contextscited by 1,582
- 2023LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understandingcited by 1,378
- 2024RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?cited by 1,270
- 2024OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problemscited by 1,099
- 2023AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Modelscited by 701
- 2021Dynabench: Rethinking Benchmarking in NLPcited by 447
- 2024∞Bench: Extending Long Context Evaluation Beyond 100K Tokenscited by 360
- 2023State of What Art? A Call for Multi-Prompt LLM Evaluationcited by 299
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- 2025MathRobust-LV: Evaluation of Large Language Models' Robustness to Linguistic Variations in Mathematical Reasoning
- 2026MathDuels: A Self-Play Benchmark That Grows
- 2025Large Language Models and Mathematical Reasoning Failures
- 2026Representation Robustness Under Executable Reasoning Constraints in Large Language Models for Mathematical Problem Solving
- 2024GSM-Plus: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of LLMs as Mathematical Problem Solvers
- 2024Can Language Models Rival Mathematics Students? Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning through Textual Manipulation and Human Experiments
- 2025Long Is More Important Than Difficult for Training Reasoning Models
- 2025Exploring LLM Reasoning Through Controlled Prompt Variations