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Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models. Lessons Learned from General Game Playing

arXiv:2602.19160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper examines the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) from a novel perspective, focusing on their ability to operate within formally specified, rule-governed environments. We evaluate four LLMs (Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash variants, Llama 3.3 70B and GPT-OSS 120B) on a suite of forward-simulation tasks-including next / multistep state formulation, and legal action generation-across a diverse set of reasoning problems illustrated through General Game Playing (GGP) game instances. Beyond reporting instance-level performance, we characterize games based on 40 structural features and analyze correlations between these features and LLM performance. Furthermore, we investigate the effects of various game obfuscations to assess the role of linguistic semantics in game definitions and the impact of potential prior exposure of LLMs to specific games during training. The main results indicate that three of the evaluated models generally perform well across most experimental settings, with performance degradation observed as the evaluation horizon increases (i.e., with a higher number of game steps). Detailed case-based analysis of the LLM performance provides novel insights into common reasoning errors in the considered logic-based problem formulation, including hallucinated rules, redundant state facts, or syntactic errors. Overall, the paper reports clear progress in formal reasoning capabilities of contemporary models.
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  • When Agda met Vampire Artjoms \v{S}inkarovs Β· Michael Rawson
    arXiv:2602.18844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dependently-typed proof assistants furnish expressive foundations for mechanised mathematics and verified software. However, automation for these systems has been either modest in scope or complex in implementation. We aim to improve the situation by integrating proof assistants with automated theorem provers (ATPs) in a simple way, while preserving the correctness guarantees of the former. A central difficulty arises from the fact that most ATP
     

When Agda met Vampire

arXiv:2602.18844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dependently-typed proof assistants furnish expressive foundations for mechanised mathematics and verified software. However, automation for these systems has been either modest in scope or complex in implementation. We aim to improve the situation by integrating proof assistants with automated theorem provers (ATPs) in a simple way, while preserving the correctness guarantees of the former. A central difficulty arises from the fact that most ATPs operate in classical first-order logic, whereas these proof assistants are grounded in constructive dependent type theory. We identify an expressive fragment of both languages -- essentially equational Horn -- that admits sound, straightforward translations in both directions. The approach produces a prototype system for Agda forwarding proof obligations to the ATP Vampire, then transforming the resulting classical proof into a constructive proof term that Agda can type-check. The prototype automatically derives proofs concerning the properties of a complex field equipped with roots of unity, which took professional Agda developers two full days to complete. The required engineering effort is modest, and we anticipate that the methodology will extend readily to other ATPs and proof assistants.

Conflict-Aware Fusion: Resolving Logic Inertia in Large Language Models via Structured Cognitive Priors

arXiv:2512.06393v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at many natural language tasks, yet their reasoning reliability under structured perturbations of rule-based systems remains brittle. We present a controlled evaluation framework consisting of four stress tests: (1) rule deletion (redundant vs. essential); (2) contradictory evidence injection; (3) logic-preserving rewrites; and (4) multi-law equivalence stacking. While representative model families (BERT, Qwen2, and TinyLlama) achieve Acc = 1.0000 on base tasks, our framework reveals a critical failure mode termed Logic Inertia - a total breakdown (Acc = 0.0000) under contradictions, where deductive momentum overrides factual reality. To resolve this, we propose Conflict-Aware Fusion, a framework grounded in the Cognitive Structure Hypothesis which posits that robust reasoning requires an explicit structural inductive bias. By imposing a dual-process architecture that separates premise verification from logical deduction, Conflict-Aware Fusion eliminates logic inertia, achieving 1.0000 accuracy on both base and contradictory stress tests, and significantly enhancing robustness to missing evidence. Our results demonstrate that, for reliable multi-step reasoning, structural verification discipline is as critical as training data scale, providing a blueprint for building robust, contradiction-aware AI systems https://github.com/14H034160212/lemo. See the OpenAI/Evals pull request https://github.com/openai/evals/pull/1622.

Generative Logic: A New Computer Architecture for Deterministic Reasoning and Knowledge Generation

arXiv:2508.00017v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Generative Logic (GL), a deterministic architecture that starts from user-supplied axiomatic definitions, written in a minimalist Mathematical Programming Language (MPL), and systematically explores a configurable region of their deductive neighborhood. A defining feature of the architecture is its unified hash-based inference engine, which executes both algebraic manipulations and deterministic logical transformations. Definitions are compiled into a distributed grid of simple Logic Blocks (LBs) that exchange messages; whenever the premises of an inference rule unify, a new fact is emitted with full provenance to its sources, yielding replayable, auditable proof graphs. Experimental validation is performed on Elementary Number Theory (ENT) utilizing a batched execution strategy. Starting from foundational axioms and definitions, the system first develops first-order Peano arithmetic, which is subsequently applied to autonomously derive and prove Gauss's summation formula as a main result. To manage combinatorial explosion, GL algorithmically enumerates conjectures and applies normalization, type constraints, and counterexample (CE) filtering. On commodity hardware, an end-to-end run completes in under 7 minutes. Generated proofs export as navigable HTML so that every inference step can be inspected independently. We outline a hardware-software co-design path toward massively parallel realizations and describe future integration with large language models (LLMs) for auto-formalization and conjecture seeding. The Python, C++, and MPL code to reproduce these experiments, along with the full proof graphs in HTML as well as machine-readable text format, are available in the project's GitHub repository at github.com/Generative-Logic/GL commit 1771330 and are permanently archived at doi:10.5281/zenodo.17206386.

A Formal Framework for the Explanation of Finite Automata Decisions

arXiv:2602.13351v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finite automata (FA) are a fundamental computational abstraction that is widely used in practice for various tasks in computer science, linguistics, biology, electrical engineering, and artificial intelligence. Given an input word, an FA maps the word to a result, in the simple case "accept" or "reject", but in general to one of a finite set of results. A question that then arises is: why? Another question is: how can we modify the input word so that it is no longer accepted? One may think that the automaton itself is an adequate explanation of its behaviour, but automata can be very complex and difficult to make sense of directly. In this work, we investigate how to explain the behaviour of an FA on an input word in terms of the word's characters. In particular, we are interested in minimal explanations: what is the minimal set of input characters that explains the result, and what are the minimal changes needed to alter the result? In this paper, we propose an efficient method to determine all minimal explanations for the behaviour of an FA on a particular word. This allows us to give unbiased explanations about which input features are responsible for the result. Experiments show that our approach scales well, even when the underlying problem is challenging.
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  • Common Knowledge Always, Forever Mart\'in Di\'eguez Β· David Fern\'andez-Duque
    arXiv:2602.13914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: There has been an increasing interest in topological semantics for epistemic logic, which has been shown to be useful for, e.g., modelling evidence, degrees of belief, and self-reference. We introduce a polytopological PDL capable of expressing common knowledge and various generalizations and show it has the finite model property over closure spaces but not over Cantor derivative spaces. The latter is shown by embedding a version of linear tempo
     

Common Knowledge Always, Forever

arXiv:2602.13914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: There has been an increasing interest in topological semantics for epistemic logic, which has been shown to be useful for, e.g., modelling evidence, degrees of belief, and self-reference. We introduce a polytopological PDL capable of expressing common knowledge and various generalizations and show it has the finite model property over closure spaces but not over Cantor derivative spaces. The latter is shown by embedding a version of linear temporal logic with `past', which does not have the finite model property.

Formal Reasoning About Confidence and Automated Verification of Neural Networks

arXiv:2511.07293v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the last decade, a large body of work has emerged on robustness of neural networks, i.e., checking if the decision remains unchanged when the input is slightly perturbed. However, most of these approaches ignore the confidence of a neural network on its output. In this work, we aim to develop a generalized framework for formally reasoning about the confidence along with robustness in neural networks. We propose a simple yet expressive grammar that captures various confidence-based specifications. We develop a novel and unified technique to verify all instances of the grammar in a homogeneous way, viz., by adding a few additional layers to the neural network, which enables the use any state-of-the-art neural network verification tool. We perform an extensive experimental evaluation over a large suite of 8870 benchmarks, where the largest network has 138M parameters, and show that this outperforms ad-hoc encoding approaches by a significant margin.
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