arXiv Machine Learning

Where Does Social Reasoning Come From? Capability Provenance in Language Models

arXiv:2606. 19625v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We use training-data attribution as an interpretable tool for capability discovery, mapping which regions of the pretraining corpus support social-reasoning versus STEM-reasoning in OLMo3-7B.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Capability Provenance in Language Models: A Case Study in Social Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 19625v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We use training-data attribution as an interpretable tool for capability discovery, mapping which regions of the pretraining corpus support social-reasoning versus STEM-reasoning in OLMo3-7B.

By Glenn Matlin, Chandreyi Chakraborty, Saehee Eom, Mika Okamoto, Rayan Castilla, Louis Jaburi, Alvin Deng, Taywon Min, Lucia Quirke, Stella Biderman, Mark Riedl
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Reason Wide, Not Deep: Amortizing the Reasoning Premium into Distilled Skills

arXiv:2608. 07885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning modes of language models outperform their non-reasoning counterparts on multi-step agentic tasks, but pay a 3-6x premium in output tokens on every episode -- much of it spent re-deriving procedures that are shared across episodes of the same domain.

By Agamdeep Singh, Srishti Gautam, Priyanshu Gupta, Nikita Mehrotra, Tanmay Bakshi, Sumit Gulwani
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Blind Men and the Elephant: Probing the Epistemic Myopia of LLMs under Long-Tail Divergent Knowledge

The paper introduces ElephantBench, a closed‑book knowledge probe with 1,094 multi‑account factual questions generated via an auditable graph‑based pipeline that pulls documents from a low‑exposure web corpus and identifies naturally occurring disagreements. Across 32 large language models, even the best model only recovers both divergent accounts on 52.4% of questions, and most models recall one account while omitting the other, indicating persistent epistemic myopia. The study shows that scaling model size and inference‑time reasoning improves recall but does not eliminate incompleteness, and that exposure imbalance in the corpus biases models toward the dominant account.

By Zhuoshi Pan, Junru Lu, Yan Qian, H. Vicky Zhao, Di Yin, Xing Sun
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

SocialMaze: A Benchmark for Evaluating and Enhancing Social Reasoning in Large Language Models in Complex Social Environments

SocialMaze is a new benchmark designed to evaluate large language models on social reasoning tasks that involve deep reasoning, dynamic interaction, and information uncertainty. It comprises six tasks drawn from social deduction games, everyday interactions, and digital communities, and includes automated checks and human validation to ensure data quality. Experiments with twelve LLMs reveal that stronger chain‑of‑thought reasoning improves performance on deeper inference tasks, while uncertainty consistently hurts results; targeted fine‑tuning on curated reasoning traces can markedly enhance structured social‑reasoning abilities.

By Zixiang Xu, Yanbo Wang, Yue Huang, Haomin Zhuang, Yujun Zhou, Jiayi Ye, Sixian Li, Zirui Song, Lang Gao, Chenxi Wang, Zhaorun Chen, Wang Pan, Yue Zhao, Jieyu Zhao, Xiangliang Zhang, Xiuying Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Math Reasoning in LLMs is Organized by Approach, Not Topic

The paper argues that large language models (LLMs) organize their internal mathematical reasoning by reusable reasoning approaches rather than by the benchmark topics they are tested on. Using a generation‑replay protocol, the authors extract activation‑importance signatures from eight models across five math sources, cluster these signatures, and find that the resulting groups align more closely with reasoning approaches than with topics. The study shows that changing the requested reasoning approach shifts cluster assignments, while paraphrasing the prompt does not, underscoring the primacy of approach over topic in LLM reasoning.

By Sajad Goudarzi, Samaneh Zamanifard, Moloud Nasiri, Hamed Rahimian