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A benchmark of grade-school math word problems used to evaluate step-by-step reasoning in language models.
DESCRIPTION
GSM8K contains curated math word problems designed to test multi-step reasoning. It’s widely used to evaluate chain-of-thought prompting and reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Results often correlate with math and logic performance across tasks. Researchers use GSM8K for reproducible comparison of prompting strategies, model variants, and finetuning approaches.
ALTERNATIVE DEFINITIONS
OpenAI
GSM8K is a dataset of 8.5K high-quality grade school math problems created to measure the ability of language models to solve multi-step math problems.
Emphasizes dataset size, quality, and focus on measuring multi-step reasoning.
Papers with Code
GSM8K is a dataset of grade-school math problems to evaluate the reasoning ability of language models.
Concise dataset description centered on reasoning evaluation.
RELATED TERMS
Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Benchmark MATH Dataset BIG-bench Step-by-Step Solutions Prompting Evaluation Metrics Math Word Problems LLM Reasoning Benchmarking
COMPETING TERMS
MATH SVAMP AQUA-RAT
KNOWLEDGE AREAS
AI Data Science Testing & Validation
TARGET AUDIENCE
AI Engineer Data Scientist MLOps Engineer
EXTERNAL SOURCES
- Wikipedia - Mathematics education
- OpenAI - Official dataset repository
- Papers with Code - Benchmark overview and leaderboards
TOP QUESTIONS
Why is GSM8K widely used in LLM research?
It reliably measures step-by-step reasoning and chain-of-thought effectiveness. Performance generalizes to related math and logic tasks.
Category: Relevancy
Does solving GSM8K require chain-of-thought?
Many models perform better with chain-of-thought, but it’s not mandatory. Some methods achieve strong results without explicit reasoning traces.
Category: Clarification
How should models be evaluated on GSM8K?
Use exact match or accuracy metrics, compare with standardized prompts, and report variance across multiple seeds or runs.
Category: Testing
What are common GSM8K mistakes?
Leaking answers during prompt construction, cherry-picking examples, and unreliable evaluation scripts can inflate reported accuracy.
Category: Mistakes
How does GSM8K compare to MATH?
GSM8K focuses on grade-school problems; MATH includes more advanced competition-level problems. MATH is generally harder.
Category: Comparison
Can GSM8K be used for finetuning?
Yes. Finetuning on GSM8K can improve math reasoning, but evaluate carefully to avoid overfitting and contamination.
Category: BestPractice
Is GSM8K representative of real-world math tasks?
It covers foundational problems. Real applications may require broader math coverage and domain-specific reasoning.
Category: Opinion
What is the biggest misunderstanding about GSM8K?
High GSM8K accuracy doesn’t guarantee general reasoning superiority. Cross-benchmark evaluation is necessary.
Category: Misunderstanding
Where should teams start with GSM8K?
Clone the official repo, use standard prompts, and benchmark against known baselines for reproducible comparisons.
Category: GettingStarted