# A Four-Stage Decomposition of Word-Problem Solving and Mechanistic Fragility in LLM Math Reasoning

**Published:** September 17, 2026
**Author:** Zhongdi Qu, Carla P. Gomes
**Source:** arXiv — cs.AI
**Language:** en-US
**HTML:** https://aiqazaqstan.com/en/articles/a-four-stage-decomposition-of-word-problem-solving-and-mechanistic-fragi

Large language models solve grade-school math word problems with high accuracy, yet a single irrelevant clause inserted into the problem can collapse it. We reconcile these observations with a mechanistic account. We show that the model's internal computation decomposes into a…

> From the original source: **arXiv — cs.AI**
> [Read full article at arXiv — cs.AI](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17804)

**Tags:** #arXiv

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