Previous studies have typically assumed that large language models are unable to accurately perform arithmetic operations, particularly multiplication of >8 digits, and operations involving decimals and fractions, without the use of calculator tools. This paper aims to challenge this misconception. With sufficient training data, a 2 billion-parameter language model can accurately perform multi-digit arithmetic operations with almost 100% accuracy without data leakage, significantly surpassing GPT-4 (whose multi-digit multiplication accuracy is only 4.3%). We also demonstrate that our MathGLM, fine-tuned from GLM-10B on a dataset with additional multi-step arithmetic operations and math problems described in text, achieves similar performance to GPT-4 on a 5,000-samples Chinese math problem test set. Our code and data are public at https://github.com/THUDM/MathGLM.
@article{arxiv.2309.03241,
title = {GPT Can Solve Mathematical Problems Without a Calculator},
author = {Zhen Yang and Ming Ding and Qingsong Lv and Zhihuan Jiang and Zehai He and Yuyi Guo and Jinfeng Bai and Jie Tang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.03241},
year = {2023}
}