arXiv AI

Quantifying Logical Consistency in Transformers via Query-Key Alignment

The paper introduces a lightweight evaluation method for logical reasoning in transformer-based language models, using query-key alignments within attention heads to compute a QK-score. This single forward-pass technique identifies valid versus invalid inferences and is validated across multiple reasoning benchmarks, showing robustness to distractors and deeper reasoning. Experiments span models from 1.5B to 70B parameters, demonstrating scalability.

arXiv AI
Oct 2

Selection-Based Structured Reasoning: Toward Efficient Multimodal Search Agents

Selection-Based Structured Reasoning (SSR) is a framework that replaces free-form reasoning with the selection of pre-specified natural‑language reasoning candidates, allowing multimodal agents to choose from a set of reusable high‑level reasoning traces. By scoring these candidates in parallel using a shared context KV cache, SSR eliminates the need for an auxiliary task head and reduces inference cost. Experiments on seven multimodal search benchmarks with 2B and 4B models show that SSR maintains competitive success rates while cutting per‑turn reasoning latency by over 90% and overall inference latency by 28–54%.

By Feiyu Gavin Zhu, Xiaoyu Zhu, Jiqi Yang, Rui Yang, Arnab Kumar Mondal, Yancheng Wang, Xinke Deng, Jean Oh, Reid Simmons, Joerg Liebelt, Xiang Kong, Zhongyu Jiang
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Stratified Consistency Distillation for Natural Language Formalization

The paper introduces Stratified Consistency Distillation, a fine‑tuning method to improve natural‑language to logical‑formula translations for neurosymbolic reasoning. It generates multiple candidate translations with a large LLM, clusters them by semantic equivalence, and selects pseudo‑labels using entropy‑based strategies—majority voting for low entropy, LLM-as‑Judge for medium entropy, and unification or abstention for high entropy. The selected pseudo‑labels are then used to fine‑tune a smaller model, yielding significant gains in Pass@K and a new Equivalent Logical Similarity metric.

By Zhichao Hou, Ferhat Erata, Joe Lilien, MohamadAli Torkamani
arXiv AI
Oct 7

COMPASS: Finding Where Reasoning Lives in Language Models

The paper introduces COMPASS, an inference-time steering technique that enhances large language model performance on mathematical reasoning tasks. By using the correctness of a model’s direct answer attempts as a latent signal, COMPASS identifies a small subset of attention heads whose activations can be steered to elicit reasoning. Experiments across three model families and multiple math benchmarks show that COMPASS improves GSM8K accuracy by an average of 16 percentage points and achieves near Chain‑of‑Thought performance while generating 20–70% fewer tokens.

By Pratyay Dutta, Kowshik Thopalli, Vivek Narayanaswamy
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Semantic Calibration Prevails Where Token Confidence Fails: Benchmarking Long-Form Scientific QA

The paper presents the first large‑scale benchmark for uncertainty quantification (UQ) calibration in long‑form scientific question answering, evaluating four UQ methods on 685,000 responses from up to 20 large language models across seven datasets. It shows that instruction tuning leads to token‑level probability polarization, undermining token‑level uncertainty signals, while reasoning model families differ in how they handle this effect. Only semantic consistency—consistency of the final answer—provides well‑calibrated outputs, demonstrating that semantic calibration remains robust in multi‑step, dependency‑rich reasoning.

By Philip M\"uller, Nicholas Popovi\v{c}, Michael F\"arber, Peter Steinbach
arXiv AI
Oct 19

Sep-Latent: Separator Tokens as Natural Compression Anchors for Implicit Reasoning

Sep‑Latent introduces separator tokens as natural compression anchors for implicit reasoning in large language models, enabling the model to aggregate and compress reasoning logic into these anchors via an Attention‑Decay mechanism. The framework aligns explicit and implicit pathways through multi‑level distillation, ensuring logical consistency, and allows dynamic reasoning depth by terminating the latent thinking phase based on query complexity. On the GSM8k‑Aug benchmark, Sep‑Latent achieves 56.8% accuracy with an average of only 5.4 tokens, outperforming prior fixed‑length implicit models in efficiency while narrowing the gap with explicit Chain‑of‑Thought methods.

By Yinlong Xu, Jianfeng Huang, Zhengdong Zhou, Mingjie Lin, Fuyu Lv, Dan Ou, Hongxia Xu, Jian Wu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Schema-Anchored Latent Reasoning for Semantic Parsing-Based Knowledge Base Question Answering

The paper introduces SALR, a schema‑anchored latent reasoning approach for generating logical forms in knowledge‑base question answering. SALR delays explicit schema commitments by generating continuous thoughts in hidden states and aligns these thoughts with a codebook of KB schema elements, guided by an alignment objective derived from gold logical forms. Experiments on GrailQA and WebQSP demonstrate that SALR consistently outperforms strong baselines, notably improving compositional question performance by 2.86 F1 points over TIARA.

By Guangze Gao, Zixuan Li, Sikui Zhang, Chunfeng Yuan, Wenjuan Li, Bing Li, Xiaolong Jin, Weiming Hu