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Related papers: On the Notion that Language Models Reason

200 papers

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized many areas (e.g. natural language processing, software engineering, etc.) by achieving state-of-the-art performance on extensive downstream tasks. Aiming to achieve robust and general…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Zhiming Li , Yushi Cao , Xiufeng Xu , Junzhe Jiang , Xu Liu , Yon Shin Teo , Shang-wei Lin , Yang Liu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Aheli Poddar , Saptarshi Sahoo , Sujata Ghosh

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Walid S. Saba

Despite widespread success in language understanding and generation, large language models (LLMs) exhibit unclear and often inconsistent behavior when faced with tasks that require probabilistic reasoning. In this work, we present the first…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Mobina Pournemat , Keivan Rezaei , Gaurang Sriramanan , Arman Zarei , Jiaxiang Fu , Yang Wang , Hamid Eghbalzadeh , Soheil Feizi

Distributional semantics is the linguistic theory that a word's meaning can be derived from its distribution in natural language (i.e., its use). Language models are commonly viewed as an implementation of distributional semantics, as they…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Zhang Enyan , Zewei Wang , Michael A. Lepori , Ellie Pavlick , Helena Aparicio

Large language models (LLMs) excel on a variety of reasoning benchmarks, but previous studies suggest they sometimes struggle to generalize to unseen questions, potentially due to over-reliance on memorized training examples. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Yihuai Hong , Dian Zhou , Meng Cao , Lei Yu , Zhijing Jin

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit increasingly sophisticated linguistic capabilities, yet the extent to which these behaviors reflect human-like cognition versus advanced pattern recognition remains an open question. In this study, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Karin de Langis , Jong Inn Park , Andreas Schramm , Bin Hu , Khanh Chi Le , Michael Mensink , Ahn Thu Tong , Dongyeop Kang

Logical reasoning is central to complex human activities, such as thinking, debating, and planning; it is also a central component of many AI systems as well. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which encoder-only transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Paulo Pirozelli , Marcos M. José , Paulo de Tarso P. Filho , Anarosa A. F. Brandão , Fabio G. Cozman

This study introduces a hypothesis-testing framework to assess whether large language models (LLMs) possess genuine reasoning abilities or primarily depend on token bias. We go beyond evaluating LLMs on accuracy; rather, we aim to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Bowen Jiang , Yangxinyu Xie , Zhuoqun Hao , Xiaomeng Wang , Tanwi Mallick , Weijie J. Su , Camillo J. Taylor , Dan Roth

This article looks at how reasoning works in current Large Language Models (LLMs) that function using the token-completion method. It examines their stochastic nature and their similarity to human abductive reasoning. The argument is that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Luciano Floridi , Jessica Morley , Claudio Novelli , David Watson

Can language models (LMs) learn to faithfully describe their internal computations? Are they better able to describe themselves than other models? We study the extent to which LMs' privileged access to their own internals can be leveraged…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Belinda Z. Li , Zifan Carl Guo , Vincent Huang , Jacob Steinhardt , Jacob Andreas

Recent advances in AI have been significantly driven by the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to solve complex problems in ways that resemble human thinking. However, there is an ongoing debate about the extent to which LLMs are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Javier González , Aditya V. Nori

Language modeling studies the probability distributions over strings of texts. It is one of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing (NLP). It has been widely used in text generation, speech recognition, machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Chengwei Wei , Yun-Cheng Wang , Bin Wang , C. -C. Jay Kuo

To what extent can a neural network systematically reason over symbolic facts? Evidence suggests that large pre-trained language models (LMs) acquire some reasoning capacity, but this ability is difficult to control. Recently, it has been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-17 Alon Talmor , Oyvind Tafjord , Peter Clark , Yoav Goldberg , Jonathan Berant

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in generating personalized content and facilitating interactive dialogues, showcasing their remarkable aptitude for a myriad of applications. However, their capabilities in reasoning and providing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Min Zhang , Sato Takumi , Jack Zhang , Jun Wang

Transformer-based language models (LMs) continue to advance state-of-the-art performance on NLP benchmark tasks, including tasks designed to mimic human-inspired "commonsense" competencies. To better understand the degree to which LMs can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Antonio Laverghetta , Animesh Nighojkar , Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov , John Licato

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capability in structured prediction tasks such as semantic parsing, few amounts of research have explored the underlying mechanisms of their success. Our work studies different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Daking Rai , Yilun Zhou , Bailin Wang , Ziyu Yao

Do large language models (LLMs) display rational reasoning? LLMs have been shown to contain human biases due to the data they have been trained on; whether this is reflected in rational reasoning remains less clear. In this paper, we answer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Olivia Macmillan-Scott , Mirco Musolesi

Large Language Models (LLMs) have succeeded remarkably in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet their reasoning capabilities remain a fundamental challenge. While LLMs exhibit impressive fluency and factual recall, their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Avinash Patil , Aryan Jadon

Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant progress in reasoning tasks. However, recent studies show that transformers and LLMs fail catastrophically once reasoning problems exceed modest complexity. We revisit these findings…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Revanth Rameshkumar , Jimson Huang , Yunxin Sun , Fei Xia , Abulhair Saparov