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Causal reasoning capability is critical in advancing large language models (LLMs) toward strong artificial intelligence. While versatile LLMs appear to have demonstrated capabilities in understanding contextual causality and providing…
In this paper we leverage psychological methods to investigate LLMs' conceptual mastery in applying rules. We introduce a novel procedure to match the diversity of thought generated by LLMs to that observed in a human sample. We then…
We study syllogistic reasoning in LLMs from the logical and natural language perspectives. In process, we explore fundamental reasoning capabilities of the LLMs and the direction this research is moving forward. To aid in our studies, we…
Large language models (LLMs) are currently at the forefront of intertwining AI systems with human communication and everyday life. Therefore, it is of great importance to evaluate their emerging abilities. In this study, we show that LLMs,…
Machine learning models, and in particular language models, are being applied to various tasks that require reasoning. While such models are good at capturing patterns their ability to reason in a trustable and controlled manner is…
We study how to subvert large language models (LLMs) from following prompt-specified rules. We first formalize rule-following as inference in propositional Horn logic, a mathematical system in which rules have the form "if $P$ and $Q$, then…
The ability to derive underlying principles from a handful of observations and then generalize to novel situations -- known as inductive reasoning -- is central to human intelligence. Prior work suggests that language models (LMs) often…
Large language models (LLMs) are the result of a massive experiment in bottom-up, data-driven reverse engineering of language at scale. Despite their utility in a number of downstream NLP tasks, ample research has shown that LLMs are…
Beginning with McCarthy's Advice Taker (1959), AI has pursued the goal of providing a system with explicit, general knowledge and having the system reason over that knowledge. However, expressing the knowledge in a formal (logical or…
Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities, yet their stochastic next-token prediction creates logical inconsistencies and reward hacking that formal symbolic systems avoid. To bridge this gap, we introduce a formal logic…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as general-purpose reasoners, particularly in agentic contexts. However, their outputs remain prone to mathematical and logical errors. This is especially challenging in open-ended…
Chain-of-thought emerges as a promising technique for eliciting reasoning capabilities from Large Language Models (LLMs). However, it does not always improve task performance or accurately represent reasoning processes, leaving unresolved…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive human-like performance across various reasoning tasks. However, their mastery of underlying inferential rules still falls short of human capabilities. To investigate this, we propose a…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated good performance in many reasoning tasks, but they still struggle with some complicated reasoning tasks including logical reasoning. One non-negligible reason for LLMs' suboptimal performance…
Large Language Models have shown tremendous performance on a large variety of natural language processing tasks, ranging from text comprehension to common sense reasoning. However, the mechanisms responsible for this success remain opaque,…
Reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence that plays a crucial role in activities such as problem solving, decision making, and critical thinking. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in…
Previous work adopts large language models (LLMs) as evaluators to evaluate natural language process (NLP) tasks. However, certain shortcomings, e.g., fairness, scope, and accuracy, persist for current LLM evaluators. To analyze whether…
While large language models (LLMs) excel in mathematical and code reasoning, we observe they struggle with social reasoning tasks, exhibiting cognitive confusion, logical inconsistencies, and conflation between objective world states and…
Humans effortlessly go beyond literal meanings: If you mow the lawn, I will give you fifty dollars, is typically understood as implying that the speaker will pay only if the lawn is mowed, whereas If you are hungry, there is pizza in the…
Numerous decision-making tasks require estimating causal effects under interventions on different parts of a system. As practitioners consider using large language models (LLMs) to automate decisions, studying their causal reasoning…