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Archive / INF Seminars 2018-2025 / INF_2025_10_02_LucaChiodini

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	The Illusion of Thinking?

Chair: Andrea Mocci

Thursday

02.10

USI Campus EST, Room D0.03

16:30 - 17:30


	Luca Chiodini Università della Svizzera italiana

Abstract: How do we teach language models to “think”? Over the last couple of years, researchers have experimented with prompting strategies such as chain-of-thought and self-verification, as well as model fine-tuning (e.g., via reinforcement learning). Combined, these techniques gave rise to a class of language models dubbed “thinking” or “reasoning” models. These advanced models have exhibited surprising capabilities to solve problems that eluded classical language models. Scientific debate is still ongoing to determine whether models of this class are able to genuinely reason. This talk will present a recent paper by researchers at Apple (“The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity”) which compares reasoning and classical models when solving different tasks at different complexity levels. The results offer a few surprises: classical models outperform reasoning models on low complexity tasks, and reasoning models fail to solve tasks at high complexity even when provided an explicit algorithm in pseudocode. Are reasoning models actually thinking, or is it all a sophisticated illusion?

Biography: Luca Chiodini is a postdoctoral researcher in the LuCE research lab at the Software Institute of USI, where he obtained his PhD with a dissertation on teaching introductory programming using graphics as a domain. After completing a double MSc degree between Milano-Bicocca and USI, he decided to stay in Lugano to continue exploring what he enjoys: computer science, learning, and everything in between.