Do Language Models Follow Occam's Razor? An Evaluation of Parsimony in Inductive and Abductive Reasoning

Researchers evaluated whether large language models follow Occam's Razor principle when performing inductive and abductive reasoning, finding that while LLMs can handle simple scenarios, they struggle with complex world models and producing high-quality, simplified hypotheses. The study introduces a new framework for generating reasoning questions and an automated metric to assess hypothesis quality based on correctness and simplicity.