The Illusion of Thinking?
Faculty of Informatics - Academic Studies Administration
Date: 2 October 2025 / 16:30 - 17:30
USI East Campus, Room D0.03
Speaker: 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.
Chair: Andrea Mocci
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In February 2019, the Software Institute started its SI Seminar Series. Every Thursday afternoon, a researcher of the Institute will publicly give a short talk on a software engineering argument of their choice. Examples include, but are not limited to novel interesting papers, seminal papers, personal research overview, discussion of preliminary research ideas, tutorials, and small experiments.
On our YouTube playlist you can watch some of the past seminars. On the SI website you can find more details on the next seminar, the upcoming seminars, and an archive of the past speakers.