Same Task, Different Statement: When and How Reformulation Helps LLM Problem Solving

arXiv:2611.14997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When people face a hard problem, they often restate it in a clearer way before solving it. We study whether the same habit helps large language models by rewriting the statement of a problem. A legal rewrite must keep the meaning, the constraints, and the correct answer unchanged. We test three kinds of rewrites. Decomposition makes hidden subgoals explicit. Typed Reformulation casts the task into a more suitable solving frame. Concept Reduction removes surface detail and exposes the task structure. We evaluate them on eight math, logic, and code benchmarks with eight models, all under the same chain-of-thought solving prompt. The effect is large but depends on the problem type.