The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) interpret negation across different logical semantics—open‑world vs. closed‑world, two‑ vs. three‑valued, and credulous vs. skeptical reasoning. Using the newly introduced NAFBench, a procedural generator that creates solver‑certified logic programs and their natural‑language verbalizations, the authors evaluate LLMs on four semantic viewpoints (SLDNF, well‑founded semantics, and stable‑model semantics). Results show a persistent gap: even the strongest models achieve only 59–74% accuracy, with many models sensitive to rule ordering and prone to overcommitment on undefined cases, though some frontier models reach near‑perfect performance on a fixed‑complexity set.
"whyItMatters":"The study highlights that current LLMs struggle to reliably follow explicitly specified negation semantics, underscoring a limitation in their logical reasoning capabilities."
By Qiming Bao, Agnieszka Mensfelt, Michael J. Witbrock, Kostas Stathis
The paper introduces the concept of "linguistic illegibility," describing how a large language model’s (LLM) language outputs and extracted linguistic features may not accurately reflect its internal computations. It argues that because LLMs compute primarily in activation spaces, any reliance on linguistic self‑reporting for security—such as chain‑of‑thought monitoring or constitutional self‑critique—cannot be fully reliable. The authors propose taint tracking and other sandboxing techniques that do not depend on the model’s linguistic state as a more robust security foundation.
By James Mickens
arXiv:2607. 12650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool access alone does not make LLM empirical reasoning governable: accepted outputs need not descend from attested evidence, and accepted deductions need not hold up under formal scrutiny.
By Junyu Ren
arXiv:2606. 08539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents increasingly take consequential actions -- shell commands, cloud operations, and arbitrary tool-calls -- so a trust layer must decide, per action, whether to allow, warn, block, or escalate.
By Chenglin Yang
arXiv:2606. 16603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in data-intensive analytical tasks, yet their outputs are rarely verifiable: a reliance on linear text trajectories makes their reasoning difficult to audit.
By Jiajie Jin, Zhao Yang, Wenle Liao, Yuyang Hu, Guanting Dong, Xiaoxi Li, Yutao Zhu, Zhicheng Dou
arXiv:2608. 03291v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves large language model (LLM) performance while also providing an observable interface to the model's reasoning process.
By Shashwat Sourav, Aishwarya Balwani
arXiv:2606. 15246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Provenance-enhanced statements of the form "according to $X$, $\varphi$" are pervasive in contemporary knowledge graphs, especially in domains where graph content primarily represents claims, interpretations, and hypotheses (\emph{capta}) rather than observer-independent facts (\emph{data}).
By Fabio Vitali, Valentina Pasqual
The paper introduces HypoAgent, an agentic framework for refining abductive hypotheses over knowledge graphs. It treats user-provided conditions as steering operators, using a small generator for initial proposals, root-cause analysis to identify problematic branches, and a refiner agent that revises hypotheses based on diagnosis and prior proposals. Experiments on BioKG, PharmKG8k, and DBpedia50 show HypoAgent surpasses one-shot generation in both single-turn and multi-turn scenarios, including unconditional settings.
By Yisen Gao, Yixi Cai, Tianshi Zheng, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song
arXiv:2608. 16813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agents now write knowledge graphs, but knowledge-graph stores still carry defaults set when humans curated them: accept writes now and clean later, keep one time axis or none, treat every writer's facts as equally trustworthy, and leave governance to dashboards and middleware.
By Steve Brown
arXiv:2508. 01273v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Explicit knowledge conflicts, occurring when retrieved contexts contain contradictory information, pose a fundamental challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs) as they integrate increasingly diverse data sources.
By Xianda Zheng, Zijian Huang, Meng-Fen Chiang, Jiamou Liu, Yuan Fang, Michael Witbrock, Kaiqi Zhao
The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.
By Qing Ye, Meng-Hsuan Lin
arXiv:2607. 23386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We document a failure class in frontier large language models -- exception chain collapse -- observed in eligibility evaluation under nested conditional rules of the form "A is required UNLESS B applies, UNLESS C overrides B".
By Paul Simpson, John Kozak, Lisa Doake