Connecting the Dots: Evaluating Abstract Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs Using the New York Times Connections Word Game

The New York Times Connections game has emerged as a popular and challenging pursuit for word puzzle enthusiasts. We collect 200 Connections games to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) against expert and novice human players. Our results show that even the best-performing LLM, GPT-4o, which has otherwise shown impressive reasoning abilities on a wide variety of benchmarks, can only fully solve 8% of the games. Compared to GPT-4o, novice and expert players perform better, with expert human players significantly outperforming GPT-4o. To deepen our understanding we create a taxonomy of the knowledge types required to successfully categorize words in the Connections game, revealing that LLMs struggle with associative, encyclopedic, and linguistic knowledge. Our findings establish the New York Times Connections game as a challenging benchmark for evaluating abstract reasoning capabilities in humans and AI systems.

Guiding LLM Temporal Logic Generation with Explicit Separation of Data and Control

Temporal logics are powerful tools that are widely used for the synthesis and verification of reactive systems. The recent progress on Large Language Models (LLMs) has the potential to make the process of writing such specifications more accessible. However, writing specifications in temporal logics remains challenging for all but the most expert users. A key question in using LLMs for temporal logic specification engineering is to understand what kind of guidance is most helpful to the LLM and the users to easily produce specifications. Looking specifically at the problem of reactive program synthesis, we explore the impact of providing an LLM with guidance on the separation of control and data--making explicit for the LLM what functionality is relevant for the specification, and treating the remaining functionality as an implementation detail for a series of pre-defined functions and predicates. We present a benchmark set and find that this separation of concerns improves specification generation. Our benchmark provides a test set against which to verify future work in LLM generation of temporal logic specifications.

Enforcing Temporal Constraints on Generative Agent Behavior with Reactive Synthesis

The surge in popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened doors for new approaches to the creation of interactive agents. However, managing the temporal behavior of such agents over the course of an interaction remains challenging. The stateful, long-term horizon and quantitative reasoning required for coherent agent behavior does not fit well into the LLM paradigm. We propose a combination of formal logic-based program synthesis and LLM content generation to create generative agents that adhere to temporal constraints. Our approach uses Temporal Stream Logic (TSL) to generate an automaton that enforces a temporal structure on an agent and leaves the details of each action for a moment in time to an LLM. By using TSL, we are able to augment the generative agent where users have a higher level of guarantees on behavior, better interpretability of the system, and more ability to build agents in a modular way. We evaluate our approach on different tasks involved in creating a coherent interactive agent specialized for various application domains. We found that over all of the tasks, our approach using TSL achieves at least 96% adherence, whereas the pure LLM-based approach demonstrates as low as 14.67% adherence.