arXiv AI

Is Code Better Than Language for Algorithmic Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 15589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For tool-augmented language models, comparing natural-language reasoning with code-execution pipelines is difficult because the comparison changes both the intermediate representation and the execution mechanism.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Exploring Extrinsic and Intrinsic Properties for Effective Reasoning with Code Interpreter

arXiv:2606. 16934v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning with a Code Interpreter (CI) has emerged as an effective paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through executable computation and iterative verification.

By Patomporn Payoungkhamdee, Napat Laosaengpha, Jenta Wonglertsakul, Pittawat Taveekitworachai, Pume Tuchinda, Panjapong Poobanchuen, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Sarana Nutanong
arXiv AI
Aug 11

TempoBench: Reasoning Execution Without Causal Attribution Is Just Simulation

arXiv:2510. 27544v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current training paradigms, optimized for long-horizon reasoning trace execution, have made Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at pattern matching and forward simulation of reasoning, but underperform at counterfactual causal understanding and reasoning.

By Nikolaus Holzer, William Fishell, Baishakhi Ray, Mark Santolucito
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Beyond Output Correctness: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Language Model Reasoning in Coding Tasks

The paper introduces CodeRQ-Bench, the first benchmark for assessing large language model reasoning quality across coding tasks such as generation, summarization, and classification. It analyzes over a thousand mismatches from existing evaluators, identifies recurring limitations, and derives design insights that lead to a new two‑stage evaluator, VERA. Experiments show VERA outperforms strong baselines, improving AUCROC by up to 0.26 and AUPRC by up to 0.21 on four datasets.

By Yuangang Li, Justin Tian Jin Chen, Ethan Yu, David Hong, Iftekhar Ahmed
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

Capable yet Parsimonious: Extracting and Characterizing Hidden Chain-of-Thought in Frontier Models

The paper demonstrates that frontier language models can be prompted to expose their internal chain-of-thought reasoning via a simple custom tool. By comparing these extracted traces to native reasoning on open-source models, the authors confirm that the externalized reasoning aligns with genuine reasoning and outperforms no-reasoning baselines across math, science, and code tasks. They further analyze the structure of the reasoning, noting token-efficient, directed reasoning in models like GPT‑6 Astra, which externalizes only crucial steps while handling elementary ones internally.

By Xiaoyu Luo, Tao Ren, Wenrui Yu, Xiao Li, Qiongxiu Li, Johannes Bjerva
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

TRACES: Tagging Reasoning Steps for Adaptive Cost-Efficient Early-Stopping

TRACES (Tagging Reasoning Steps for Adaptive Cost‑Efficient Early‑Stopping) is a lightweight framework that tags reasoning steps of large‑language models in real time, enabling adaptive, cost‑efficient early stopping during inference. By monitoring the types of steps generated, the method identifies when models shift their reasoning after arriving at a correct answer, allowing for interpretable stopping criteria. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks (MATH500, GSM8K, AIME) and knowledge benchmarks (MMLU, GPQA) show token reductions of 20–50% while preserving accuracy, with more conservative thresholds needed for harder tasks such as BeyondAIME and IMO AnswerBench.

By Yannis Belkhiter, Seshu Tirupathi, Giulio Zizzo, John D. Kelleher
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Evaluating Language Models on Cross-Language Code Functional Equivalence

The paper introduces PolyHuman, a dataset of human-written programs in C++, Java, and Python, to test whether large language models can judge functional equivalence across languages. Using this dataset, the authors evaluate several open-weight and proprietary LLMs, finding that models struggle more with harder problems, show language-specific biases, and rely partly on superficial similarity cues. They also observe run‑to‑run instability in GPT‑o4‑mini, concluding that current LLMs do not reliably capture functional equivalence within or across programming languages.

By Hui Sun, Anderson Uch\^oa, Rohit Gheyi, Wesley K. G. Assun\c{c}\~ao
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 5

Forethought: Verifiable Reasoning from Neurosymbolic Primitive Programming

Current agentic workflows usually involve decomposing user requests into sequences of tool calls with correctly resolved parameters, the results of which are processed through reasoning traces in the language model's context window. The prevailing route to improve such reasoning is test-time scaling, which trains models to search over long chains of thought; but the resulting capability is entangled in model weights, is not verifiable step-by-step, and is costly at inference.

arXiv AI
Jul 24

Representation Robustness Under Executable Reasoning Constraints in Large Language Models for Mathematical Problem Solving

arXiv:2607. 20520v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on mathematical problem solving, yet prior work often treats representationally equivalent formulations as interchangeable and conflates reasoning errors with interface failures.

By Sagnik Nath, Edith Aurora Graf, Liang Zhang, Diego Zapata-Rivera