Number Cookbook

📓 Number Cookbook: Number Understanding of Language Models and How to Improve It

This research paper examines the numerical understanding and processing abilities (NUPA) of large language models (LLMs). The authors create a benchmark to test LLMs on four numerical representations (integers, floating-point numbers, fractions, and scientific notation) across 17 tasks grouped into four ability categories. They find that, despite strong problem-solving capabilities, LLMs struggle with basic numerical operations. The paper evaluates methods to enhance NUPA during pretraining and finetuning, such…