{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/macgyver-are-large-language-models-creative","title":"MacGyver: Are Large Language Models Creative Problem Solvers?","arxiv_id":"2311.09682","date":"2023-11-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yufei Tian","Abhilasha Ravichander","Lianhui Qin","Ronan Le Bras","Raja Marjieh","Nanyun Peng","Yejin Choi","Thomas L. Griffiths","Faeze Brahman"],"abstract":"We explore the creative problem-solving capabilities of modern LLMs in a novel constrained setting. To this end, we create MACGYVER, an automatically generated dataset consisting of over 1,600 real-world problems deliberately designed to trigger innovative usage of objects and necessitate out-of-the-box thinking. We then present our collection to both LLMs and humans to compare and contrast their problem-solving abilities. MACGYVER is challenging for both groups, but in unique and complementary ways. For instance, humans excel in tasks they are familiar with but struggle with domain-specific knowledge, leading to a higher variance. In contrast, LLMs, exposed to a variety of specialized knowledge, attempt broader problems but fail by proposing physically-infeasible actions. Finally, we provide a detailed error analysis of LLMs, and demonstrate the potential of enhancing their problem-solving ability with novel prompting techniques such as iterative step-wise reflection and divergent-convergent thinking. This work (1) introduces a fresh arena for intelligent agents focusing on intricate aspects of physical reasoning, planning, and unconventional thinking, which supplements the existing spectrum of machine intelligence; and (2) provides insight into the constrained problem-solving capabilities of both humans and AI.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09682v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.09682v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"macgyver-are-large-language-models-creative","repo_url":"https://github.com/allenai/macgyver","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2311.09682","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}