The paper investigates whether current reasoning models exhibit systematicity—the idea that understanding one concept should extend to closely related variations—by extending rule induction tasks from cognitive science. Using task isomorphisms like recombination and substitution, the authors generate structurally equivalent task variants and test models on them. Results show that while models can solve the original tasks, they frequently fail on these equivalent variants, indicating a lack of systematicity in their reasoning abilities.
By Simon Schug, Brenden M. Lake
PotARCin expands the ARC benchmark by evaluating abstract reasoning across five dimensions—Definition, Classification, Constrained Generation, Editing, and Inversion—using programmatic generation of new task instances. The study shows a 25‑52 percentage‑point performance gap between standard ARC evaluation and PotARCin, and reveals that multi‑dimensional assessment can reorder models that appear equivalent under single‑metric accuracy. Additionally, a new held‑out set, P‑ARC, demonstrates low model accuracy (1‑8%) across all dimensions, highlighting the need for more comprehensive tests of abstract reasoning.
By Claas Beger, Ryan Yi, Melanie Mitchell
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
The paper proposes a unified framework for test‑time reasoning methods, framing them as recursion operators—GROW, PRUNE, and BRANCH—applied to an agent’s reasoning trace. Experiments across five benchmarks and three frontier models show that BRANCH, which samples and selects among multiple reasoning paths, consistently outperforms the other operators and a single‑pass chain‑of‑thought baseline, improving accuracy by an average of 5.98 percentage points. The study also highlights the importance of paired evaluation and careful handling of scoring‑pipeline failures, as these factors can significantly alter comparative outcomes.
By Shengxin Zhang, Xiaomin Wu, Xiyang Wu, Jing Xie
arXiv:2606. 02835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve performance by generating explicit intermediate reasoning traces through increased test-time compute, yet the assumption that longer reasoning is consistently beneficial remains under-examined.
By Simone Caldarella, Davide Talon, Rahaf Aljundi, Elisa Ricci, Massimiliano Mancini
arXiv:2606. 01667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling has become a major way to improve large language model reasoning, but its orchestration has remained designer-engineered: a fixed sample budget, a fixed refinement loop, a fixed scoring rule, or a fixed search policy decides how compute is spent, leaving the model in charge of solving but not of orchestration.
By Peijia Qin, Qi Cao, Pengtao Xie