Numbers are crucial for various real-world domains such as finance, economics, and science. Thus, understanding and reasoning with numbers are essential skills for language models to solve different tasks. While different numerical benchmarks have been introduced in recent years, they are limited to specific numerical aspects mostly. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical taxonomy for numerical reasoning skills with more than ten reasoning types across four levels: representation, number sense, manipulation, and complex reasoning. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art models to identify reasoning challenges specific to them. Henceforth, we develop a diverse set of numerical probes employing a semi-automated approach. We focus on the tabular Natural Language Inference (TNLI) task as a case study and measure models' performance shifts. Our results show that no model consistently excels across all numerical reasoning types. Among the probed models, FlanT5 (few-/zero-shot) and GPT-3.5 (few-shot) demonstrate strong overall numerical reasoning skills compared to other models. Label-flipping probes indicate that models often exploit dataset artifacts to predict the correct labels.

这篇论文提出了一个层次化的数值推理技能分类法，涵盖四个级别的十多种推理类型。通过对先进模型进行全面评估，并开发了一组多样化的数值探针，论文发现在所有数值推理类型中，FlanT5（无/少数据）和GPT-3.5（少数据）相对其他模型表现出强大的整体数值推理技能。标签颠倒探针表明模型经常利用数据集的特征来预测正确的标签。

探索语言模型的数值推理能力：对表格数据进行综合分析