arXiv AI

AXIOM: A Trust-First Neuro-Symbolic Execution Architecture for Self-Explaining Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 00671v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present AXIOM, a trust-first neuro-symbolic architecture for natural-language mathematical reasoning.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Thinking in a Low-Resource Language: What SFT Builds, What RL Fixes, What Accuracy Cannot See

The paper evaluates how three large mixture‑of‑experts models (Alibaba, OpenAI, NVIDIA) can be fine‑tuned to reason in a low‑resource language, specifically Greek. Accuracy metrics show little change, but the authors uncover significant qualitative improvements: after supervised fine‑tuning, models reason in Greek on ~98% of items, with better grammaticality and retained general ability. Reinforcement learning with pre‑registered rewards further eliminates reasoning‑channel leaks and format skips, while the Greek‑reasoning habit remains robust to an accuracy‑only gradient.

By Ayoub Kirouane, Christos Petrocheilos
arXiv AI
Sep 3

LLM-as-a-Judge Is Not an Oracle: Why Self-Improving Agents Need Deterministic Guardrails

The paper argues that using a large language model (LLM) as the sole judge in self‑improving agent pipelines is problematic, as the judge can be biased or manipulated, leading to false confidence in system performance. The authors propose a new framework, PROCTOR, which replaces the oracle judge with a deterministic, teacher‑student loop that enforces guardrails such as sandboxing, role separation, and acceptance checks to prevent cheating and ensure reliable evaluation. Experiments across contract analysis, compliance review, and code quality demonstrate that PROCTOR mitigates eleven identified failure modes that previously allowed agents to achieve perfect scores while hiding significant capability gaps.

By Vansh Wahi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Same Quantity, Different Answer: Numerical Representation Invariance in Language Models

The paper introduces a benchmark of 3,600 exact‑rational word problems and 8,600 prompts that test whether language models give the same canonical answer when the same quantity is expressed in different numeric forms (decimal, fraction, percentage, number word, scientific notation, or unit‑converted). After normalizing answer syntax, canonical accuracy is high (0.969–0.996), but correctness across equivalent representations drops to 0.848–0.981, revealing that many errors stem from the evaluator’s number grammar rather than the models’ reasoning. The study also finds that representation consensus does not outperform paraphrase consensus on low‑error subsets and that certain models (e.g., Mistral Small 4) exhibit systematic unit‑conversion errors.

By Ephraim Atta-Duncan
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Not What You Meant: Can LLMs Follow a Specified Negation Semantics?

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
arXiv AI
Sep 11

Proof-Carrying Cognition: Closing the Verification Gap with Reality-Settled Reward

The paper introduces the concept of proof‑carrying cognition, aiming to close the verification gap in language‑model reasoning by using reality‑settled rewards. It presents a theoretical framework linking verifier‑gold correlation to compute‑capability trade‑offs, demonstrates that unsound verifiers degrade under best‑of‑N selection while sound verifiers improve, and proposes a new benchmark metric, Soundness‑under‑Pressure, for evaluating reality‑settled reasoning systems.

By Eshwar Reddy M, Sourav Karmakar