Abstract:A paraphrase-quality audit of MathCheck (ICLR 2025) detected 4 semantically incorrect paraphrases in 129 groups (3.1%); removing them drops GPT-4o from rank 2 to rank 4 and elevates Claude Haiku and DeepSeek V3 above it; these ranking changes are invisible to any single-model evaluation. Cross-model unanimity found these errors automatically (>= 3/4 models for MathCheck; >= 6/9 for our primary evaluation) for under $10; in our own dataset the same protocol found that 47% of auto-generated connective-variation paraphrases were semantically incorrect. That flaw compounds a deeper measurement gap: Claude Haiku 4.5 achieves 86% accuracy yet SCR=50%, meaning half its theorems are answered differently under semantically equivalent restatements, while aggregate accuracy across 9 models spans only 86-96% yet Semantic Consistency Rates (SCR) span 50-82% -- a 32-point gap invisible to standard benchmarks. Formally, for any target ranking over 9 frontier models there exists a weighting over paraphrase families that realizes it (No-Free-Benchmark corollary), because no model Pareto-dominates all families -- so benchmark designers who select families are implicitly choosing which model wins. FormInv supplies the audit protocol (replicated on external benchmarks at 100% recall), SCR and per-theorem Cochran's Q as primary invariance measures evaluated on 9 models across 366-811 items (on Lean4-verified theorems), and FormInvSelector for regime-aware model selection.
Abstract:Standard accuracy on binary reasoning benchmarks hides critical failure modes: prior collapse, inconsistency under paraphrase, and inability to reason about parameter-dependent dynamics. We present ChaosBench-Logic v2, a 40,886-question benchmark over 165 dynamical systems with 27 FOL predicates and 78 axiom edges, together with CARE (Calibration- and Adversarial-Robust Evaluation), a protocol that surfaces these pathologies. Evaluating 14 models, we find that regime-transition reasoning remains near random (MCC = 0.05) even for frontier models, whereas FOL deduction with given premises reaches MCC = 0.52. Per-family decomposition shows that the proprietary-model advantage concentrates on cross-indicator (+0.40) and consistency tasks, while open-source Qwen 2.5-32B dominates indicator diagnostics (0.91 vs. 0.45). Two models exhibit negative MCC on bifurcation questions, confirmed as systematic anti-correlation via confusion-matrix analysis.
Abstract:Published transfer-BO comparisons often estimate an average treatment effect of acquisition choice over hidden regime variables, while practitioners need the conditional effect for their specific prior quality, budget ratio, and metric. An audit of 40 transfer-BO papers from NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AISTATS, UAI, TMLR, JMLR, and AutoML-Conf (2022-2025) finds that 98% never vary B/|A| as a controlled axis. On the same GDSC2 benchmark, changing only the budget reverses the ranking: at B=50, Greedy outperforms UCB by 0.050 Hit@1, while at B=100, UCB outperforms Greedy by 0.035. We capture this transition with the Portable Regime Score PRS=(B/|A|)(1-rho), where rho is the prior rank correlation and can be estimated from pilot contexts before the main comparison. Across 79 conditions spanning chemistry, drug-response biology, and HPO, a hierarchical model gives beta=0.50 (p=1.1e-9), and 19% of conditions fall in an equivalence zone where |advantage|<0.01 Hit@1. In five published reversal cases, PRS predicts the winner from pre-comparison observables. A No-Free-Leaderboard proposition explains why unconditional rankings are unstable: when CATE changes sign across regimes, the reported ATE becomes a function of benchmark mixture. RegimePlanner, which estimates rho online and switches acquisition accordingly, wins all 16 HPO-B search spaces at B=100 and exceeds the matched {Greedy,UCB} per-context oracle on GDSC2 by 18%. Pre-registered predictions achieve 27/40=67.5% overall accuracy and above 90% within EMA prior families. The practical protocol is simple: report B/|A|, rho, K, and metric alongside any claimed acquisition advantage.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language tasks but remain brittle in domains requiring precise logical and symbolic reasoning. Chaotic dynamical systems provide an especially demanding test because chaos is deterministic yet often misinterpreted as randomness or complexity. We introduce ChaosBench-Logic, a benchmark that evaluates LLM reasoning across 30 diverse dynamical systems using a unified first-order logic (FOL) ontology. Each system is annotated with truth assignments for 11 semantic predicates, and 621 questions are generated across seven reasoning categories, including multi-hop implications, cross-system analogies, counterfactual reasoning, bias probes, and multi-turn dialogues. We define metrics for logical accuracy, implication consistency, dialogue coherence, and contradiction, and we release an open-source evaluation pipeline. Initial experiments show that frontier LLMs such as GPT-4, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and the open-source LLaMA-3 70B achieve 91-94% per-item accuracy, yet still score 0% on compositional items and exhibit fragile global coherence. Dialogue-level accuracy ranges from 53.1% (GPT-4 CoT) to 75.5% (LLaMA-3 zero-shot). ChaosBench-Logic provides a rigorous testbed for diagnosing such failures and a foundation for developing neuro-symbolic approaches that improve scientific reasoning in LLMs.