arXiv Machine Learning

Transformer See, Transformer Do: Copying as an Intermediate Step in Learning Analogical Reasoning

arXiv:2604. 06501v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Analogical reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, enabling us to solve new problems by transferring knowledge from one situation to another.

arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Graph Metanetworks for Transformer Based Language Models

The paper introduces graph metanetworks for transformer-based language models, addressing the challenge that different weight configurations can implement the same function due to a rich symmetry group. It formalizes a weight‑space symmetry group for complete decoder‑only language models and presents a graph construction invariant to these symmetries. The authors also create two new transformer‑population datasets with tasks like training‑corpus prediction and fine‑tuning detection, where their method outperforms existing baselines.

By Yonathan Wolanowsky, Guy Bar-Shalom, Fabrizio Frasca, Haggai Maron
arXiv AI
5d ago

Cognitive Foundations for Reasoning and Their Manifestation in LLMs

The paper presents a taxonomy of 28 cognitive elements derived from cognitive science to analyze reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Using a fine‑grained evaluation framework, the authors compare 192,000 model traces with 1,346 human think‑aloud traces, finding that while models deploy similar cognitive elements, they differ in usage patterns. The study introduces test‑time reasoning guidance that improves model accuracy on ill‑structured problems by 9.7 percentage points and highlights a research gap in self‑awareness, advocating for a shared vocabulary to diagnose failures and guide robust model development.

By Shuyue Stella Li, Priyanka Kargupta, Haocheng Wang, Jinu Lee, Dean Light, Shan Chen, Orevaoghene Ahia, Thomas L. Griffiths, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Jiawei Han, Asli Celikyilmaz, Yulia Tsvetkov
arXiv AI
6d ago

ConceptARC at Scale: Studying Conceptual Understanding in Reasoning Models

ConceptARC at Scale introduces a generator that produces thousands of ARC-style tasks focused on specific spatial and semantic concepts, expanding the original benchmark by tenfold. The new dataset, ConceptARC-100, contains 1,600 manually reviewed tasks across 16 concepts, each with 100 tasks. Evaluation of large reasoning models on this dataset reveals that they reliably solve certain concepts, struggle with others, and develop internal representations that cluster by transformation operations such as recoloring, removal, or translation.

By Philipp Mondorf, Adrien Deli\`ege, Solim LeGris, Claas Beger, Ryan Yi, Barbara Plank, Brenden M. Lake, Todd M. Gureckis
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Penelope: Localized Latent Recurrence for Efficient Structured Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 25915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Complex structured reasoning tasks often require additional computation, yet current language models obtain it mainly by increasing parameter scale or by serializing intermediate steps as chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens.

By Yutong Chen, Shouqian Shi, Xinran Liu, Haochen Wang, Jiaying Wang, Tianxing Xu, Yuanxi Wang, Zirui Ding
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Thought-Like-Pro: Enhancing Reasoning of Large Language Models through Self-Bootstrapped Prolog-based Chain-of-Thought

Thought‑Like‑Pro is a learning framework that enhances large language models’ reasoning by combining imitation learning with a Prolog logic engine. The approach imitates chain‑of‑thought processes verified by symbolic reasoning, allowing models to formulate rules from instructions and convert Prolog‑derived reasoning trajectories into natural language. Experiments show significant reasoning improvements and robust generalization with only a marginal performance drop on distributional extrapolation tasks.

By Xihe Qiu (Shanghai University of Engineering Science, National University of Singapore), Yongxin Deng (Shanghai University of Engineering Science, University of Technology Sydney), Xiaoyu Tan (National University of Singapore), Zhen Fang (University of Technology Sydney), Ling Chen (University of Technology Sydney)
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Learning Composable Chains-of-Thought

arXiv:2505.22635v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A common approach for teaching large language models (LLMs) to reason is to train on chain-of-thought (CoT) traces of in-distribution reasoni...

By Fangcong Yin, Zeyu Leo Liu, Liu Leqi, Xi Ye, Greg Durrett