While large language models have shown reasoning capabilities, their application to the audio modality, particularly in large audio-language models (ALMs), remains significantly underdeveloped. Addressing this gap requires a systematic approach, involving a capable base model, high-quality reasoning-oriented audio data, and effective training algorithms. In this study, we present a comprehensive solution: we introduce the Audio Logical Reasoning (ALR) dataset, consisting of 6,446 text-audio annotated samples specifically designed for complex reasoning tasks. Building on this resource, we propose SoundMind, a rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm tailored to endow ALMs with deep bimodal reasoning abilities. By training Qwen2.5-Omni-7B on the ALR dataset using SoundMind, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in audio logical reasoning. This work highlights the impact of combining high-quality, reasoning-focused datasets with specialized RL techniques, advancing the frontier of auditory intelligence in language models. Our code and the proposed dataset are available at https://github.com/xid32/SoundMind.
Graph learning has been crucial to many real-world tasks, but they are often studied with a closed-world assumption, with all possible labels of data known a priori. To enable effective graph learning in an open and noisy environment, it is critical to inform the model users when the model makes a wrong prediction to in-distribution data of a known class, i.e., misclassification detection or when the model encounters out-of-distribution from novel classes, i.e., out-of-distribution detection. This paper introduces Evidential Reasoning Network (EVINET), a framework that addresses these two challenges by integrating Beta embedding within a subjective logic framework. EVINET includes two key modules: Dissonance Reasoning for misclassification detection and Vacuity Reasoning for out-of-distribution detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVINET outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple metrics in the tasks of in-distribution classification, misclassification detection, and out-of-distribution detection. EVINET demonstrates the necessity of uncertainty estimation and logical reasoning for misclassification detection and out-of-distribution detection and paves the way for open-world graph learning. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/SSSKJ/EviNET.
Neuro-symbolic approaches combining large language models (LLMs) with solvers excels in logical reasoning problems need long reasoning chains. In this paradigm, LLMs serve as translators, converting natural language reasoning problems into formal logic formulas. Then reliable symbolic solvers return correct solutions. Despite their success, we find that LLMs, as translators, struggle to handle lexical diversification, a common linguistic phenomenon, indicating that LLMs as logic translators are unreliable in real-world scenarios. Moreover, existing logical reasoning benchmarks lack lexical diversity, failing to challenge LLMs' ability to translate such text and thus obscuring this issue. In this work, we propose SCALe, a benchmark designed to address this significant gap through **logic-invariant lexical diversification**. By using LLMs to transform original benchmark datasets into lexically diversified but logically equivalent versions, we evaluate LLMs' ability to consistently map diverse expressions to uniform logical symbols on these new datasets. Experiments using SCALe further confirm that current LLMs exhibit deficiencies in this capability. Building directly on the deficiencies identified through our benchmark, we propose a new method, MenTaL, to address this limitation. This method guides LLMs to first construct a table unifying diverse expressions before performing translation. Applying MenTaL through in-context learning and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) significantly improves the performance of LLM translators on lexically diversified text. Our code is now available at https://github.com/wufeiwuwoshihua/LexicalDiver.
Logical reasoning is a core capability for many applications of large language models (LLMs), yet existing benchmarks often rely solely on final-answer accuracy, failing to capture the quality and structure of the reasoning process. We propose FineLogic, a fine-grained evaluation framework that assesses logical reasoning across three dimensions: overall benchmark accuracy, stepwise soundness, and representation-level alignment. In addition, to better understand how reasoning capabilities emerge, we conduct a comprehensive study on the effects of supervision format during fine-tuning. We construct four supervision styles (one natural language and three symbolic variants) and train LLMs under each. Our findings reveal that natural language supervision yields strong generalization even on out-of-distribution and long-context tasks, while symbolic reasoning styles promote more structurally sound and atomic inference chains. Further, our representation-level probing shows that fine-tuning primarily improves reasoning behaviors through step-by-step generation, rather than enhancing shortcut prediction or internalized correctness. Together, our framework and analysis provide a more rigorous and interpretable lens for evaluating and improving logical reasoning in LLMs.
Climate Finance Bench introduces an open benchmark that targets question-answering over corporate climate disclosures using Large Language Models. We curate 33 recent sustainability reports in English drawn from companies across all 11 GICS sectors and annotate 330 expert-validated question-answer pairs that span pure extraction, numerical reasoning, and logical reasoning. Building on this dataset, we propose a comparison of RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) approaches. We show that the retriever's ability to locate passages that actually contain the answer is the chief performance bottleneck. We further argue for transparent carbon reporting in AI-for-climate applications, highlighting advantages of techniques such as Weight Quantization.
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires the agent to navigate by following natural instructions under partial observability, making it difficult to align perception with language. Recent methods mitigate this by imagining future scenes, yet they rely on vision-based synthesis, leading to high computational cost and redundant details. To this end, we propose to adaptively imagine key environmental semantics via \textit{language} form, enabling a more reliable and efficient strategy. Specifically, we introduce a novel Adaptive Text Dreamer (ATD), a dual-branch self-guided imagination policy built upon a large language model (LLM). ATD is designed with a human-like left-right brain architecture, where the left brain focuses on logical integration, and the right brain is responsible for imaginative prediction of future scenes. To achieve this, we fine-tune only the Q-former within both brains to efficiently activate domain-specific knowledge in the LLM, enabling dynamic updates of logical reasoning and imagination during navigation. Furthermore, we introduce a cross-interaction mechanism to regularize the imagined outputs and inject them into a navigation expert module, allowing ATD to jointly exploit both the reasoning capacity of the LLM and the expertise of the navigation model. We conduct extensive experiments on the R2R benchmark, where ATD achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters. The code is \href{https://github.com/zhangpingrui/Adaptive-Text-Dreamer}{here}.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve in understanding and generating code, accurately evaluating their reliability in analyzing source code vulnerabilities becomes increasingly vital. While studies have examined LLM capabilities in tasks like vulnerability detection and repair, they often overlook the importance of both structure and semantic reasoning crucial for trustworthy vulnerability analysis. To address this gap, we introduce SV-TrustEval-C, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' abilities for vulnerability analysis of code written in the C programming language through two key dimensions: structure reasoning - assessing how models identify relationships between code elements under varying data and control flow complexities; and semantic reasoning - examining their logical consistency in scenarios where code is structurally and semantically perturbed. Our results show that current LLMs are far from satisfactory in understanding complex code relationships and that their vulnerability analyses rely more on pattern matching than on robust logical reasoning. These findings underscore the effectiveness of the SV-TrustEval-C benchmark and highlight critical areas for enhancing the reasoning capabilities and trustworthiness of LLMs in real-world vulnerability analysis tasks. Our initial benchmark dataset is publicly available.
Younger generations are growing up in a world increasingly shaped by intelligent technologies, making early AI literacy crucial for developing the skills to critically understand and navigate them. However, education in this field often emphasizes tool-based learning, prioritizing usage over understanding the underlying concepts. This lack of knowledge leaves non-experts, especially children, prone to misconceptions, unrealistic expectations, and difficulties in recognizing biases and stereotypes. In this paper, we propose a structured and replicable teaching approach that fosters foundational AI literacy in primary students, by building upon core mathematical elements closely connected to and of interest in primary curricula, to strengthen conceptualization, data representation, classification reasoning, and evaluation of AI. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted an empirical study with thirty-one fifth-grade students across two classes, evaluating their progress through a post-test and a satisfaction survey. Our results indicate improvements in terminology understanding and usage, features description, logical reasoning, and evaluative skills, with students showing a deeper comprehension of decision-making processes and their limitations. Moreover, the approach proved engaging, with students particularly enjoying activities that linked AI concepts to real-world reasoning. Materials: https://github.com/tail-unica/ai-literacy-primary-ed.
The rapid evolution of large language models in natural language processing has substantially elevated their semantic understanding and logical reasoning capabilities. Such proficiencies have been leveraged in autonomous driving systems, contributing to significant improvements in system performance. Models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1, leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, an advanced cognitive method that simulates human thinking processes, demonstrating remarkable reasoning capabilities in complex tasks. By structuring complex driving scenarios within a systematic reasoning framework, this approach has emerged as a prominent research focus in autonomous driving, substantially improving the system's ability to handle challenging cases. This paper investigates how CoT methods improve the reasoning abilities of autonomous driving models. Based on a comprehensive literature review, we present a systematic analysis of the motivations, methodologies, challenges, and future research directions of CoT in autonomous driving. Furthermore, we propose the insight of combining CoT with self-learning to facilitate self-evolution in driving systems. To ensure the relevance and timeliness of this study, we have compiled a dynamic repository of literature and open-source projects, diligently updated to incorporate forefront developments. The repository is publicly available at https://github.com/cuiyx1720/Awesome-CoT4AD.
Planning represents a fundamental capability of intelligent agents, requiring comprehensive environmental understanding, rigorous logical reasoning, and effective sequential decision-making. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on certain planning tasks, their broader application in this domain warrants systematic investigation. This paper presents a comprehensive review of LLM-based planning. Specifically, this survey is structured as follows: First, we establish the theoretical foundations by introducing essential definitions and categories about automated planning. Next, we provide a detailed taxonomy and analysis of contemporary LLM-based planning methodologies, categorizing them into three principal approaches: 1) External Module Augmented Methods that combine LLMs with additional components for planning, 2) Finetuning-based Methods that involve using trajectory data and feedback signals to adjust LLMs in order to improve their planning abilities, and 3) Searching-based Methods that break down complex tasks into simpler components, navigate the planning space, or enhance decoding strategies to find the best solutions. Subsequently, we systematically summarize existing evaluation frameworks, including benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics and performance comparisons between representative planning methods. Finally, we discuss the underlying mechanisms enabling LLM-based planning and outline promising research directions for this rapidly evolving field. We hope this survey will serve as a valuable resource to inspire innovation and drive progress in this field.
Recent advances such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek R1 have demonstrated the potential of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to enhance reasoning abilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). While open-source replication efforts have primarily focused on mathematical and coding domains, methods and resources for developing general reasoning capabilities remain underexplored. This gap is partly due to the challenge of collecting diverse and verifiable reasoning data suitable for RL. We hypothesize that logical reasoning is critical for developing general reasoning capabilities, as logic forms a fundamental building block of reasoning. In this work, we present SynLogic, a data synthesis framework and dataset that generates diverse logical reasoning data at scale, encompassing 35 diverse logical reasoning tasks. The SynLogic approach enables controlled synthesis of data with adjustable difficulty and quantity. Importantly, all examples can be verified by simple rules, making them ideally suited for RL with verifiable rewards. In our experiments, we validate the effectiveness of RL training on the SynLogic dataset based on 7B and 32B models. SynLogic leads to state-of-the-art logical reasoning performance among open-source datasets, surpassing DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B by 6 points on BBEH. Furthermore, mixing SynLogic data with mathematical and coding tasks improves the training efficiency of these domains and significantly enhances reasoning generalization. Notably, our mixed training model outperforms DeepSeek-R1-Zero-Qwen-32B across multiple benchmarks. These findings position SynLogic as a valuable resource for advancing the broader reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We open-source both the data synthesis pipeline and the SynLogic dataset at https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/SynLogic.
Large Language Models have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing tasks, with Reinforcement Learning playing a key role in adapting them to specific applications. However, obtaining ground truth answers for training LLMs in mathematical problem-solving is often challenging, costly, and sometimes unfeasible. This research delves into the utilization of format and length as surrogate signals to train LLMs for mathematical problem-solving, bypassing the need for traditional ground truth answers.Our study shows that a reward function centered on format correctness alone can yield performance improvements comparable to the standard GRPO algorithm in early phases. Recognizing the limitations of format-only rewards in the later phases, we incorporate length-based rewards. The resulting GRPO approach, leveraging format-length surrogate signals, not only matches but surpasses the performance of the standard GRPO algorithm relying on ground truth answers in certain scenarios, achieving 40.0\% accuracy on AIME2024 with a 7B base model. Through systematic exploration and experimentation, this research not only offers a practical solution for training LLMs to solve mathematical problems and reducing the dependence on extensive ground truth data collection, but also reveals the essence of why our label-free approach succeeds: base model is like an excellent student who has already mastered mathematical and logical reasoning skills, but performs poorly on the test paper, it simply needs to develop good answering habits to achieve outstanding results in exams , in other words, to unlock the capabilities it already possesses.
Charts are high-density visualization carriers for complex data, serving as a crucial medium for information extraction and analysis. Automated chart understanding poses significant challenges to existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to the need for precise and complex visual reasoning. Current step-by-step reasoning models primarily focus on text-based logical reasoning for chart understanding. However, they struggle to refine or correct their reasoning when errors stem from flawed visual understanding, as they lack the ability to leverage multimodal interaction for deeper comprehension. Inspired by human cognitive behavior, we propose ChartSketcher, a multimodal feedback-driven step-by-step reasoning method designed to address these limitations. ChartSketcher is a chart understanding model that employs Sketch-CoT, enabling MLLMs to annotate intermediate reasoning steps directly onto charts using a programmatic sketching library, iteratively feeding these visual annotations back into the reasoning process. This mechanism enables the model to visually ground its reasoning and refine its understanding over multiple steps. We employ a two-stage training strategy: a cold start phase to learn sketch-based reasoning patterns, followed by off-policy reinforcement learning to enhance reflection and generalization. Experiments demonstrate that ChartSketcher achieves promising performance on chart understanding benchmarks and general vision tasks, providing an interactive and interpretable approach to chart comprehension.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to achieve breakthrough performance on complex logical reasoning tasks. Nevertheless, most existing research focuses on employing formal language to guide LLMs to derive reliable reasoning paths, while systematic evaluations of these capabilities are still limited. In this paper, we aim to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs across various logical reasoning problems utilizing formal languages. From the perspective of three dimensions, i.e., spectrum of LLMs, taxonomy of tasks, and format of trajectories, our key findings are: 1) Thinking models significantly outperform Instruct models, especially when formal language is employed; 2) All LLMs exhibit limitations in inductive reasoning capability, irrespective of whether they use a formal language; 3) Data with PoT format achieves the best generalization performance across other languages. Additionally, we also curate the formal-relative training data to further enhance the small language models, and the experimental results indicate that a simple rejected fine-tuning method can better enable LLMs to generalize across formal languages and achieve the best overall performance. Our codes and reports are available at https://github.com/jiangjin1999/FormalEval.
In modern medicine, clinical diagnosis relies on the comprehensive analysis of primarily textual and visual data, drawing on medical expertise to ensure systematic and rigorous reasoning. Recent advances in large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and agent-based methods hold great potential for medical diagnosis, thanks to the ability to effectively integrate multi-modal patient data. However, they often provide direct answers and draw empirical-driven conclusions without quantitative analysis, which reduces their reliability and clinical usability. We propose MedAgent-Pro, a new agentic reasoning paradigm that follows the diagnosis principle in modern medicine, to decouple the process into sequential components for step-by-step, evidence-based reasoning. Our MedAgent-Pro workflow presents a hierarchical diagnostic structure to mirror this principle, consisting of disease-level standardized plan generation and patient-level personalized step-by-step reasoning. To support disease-level planning, an RAG-based agent is designed to retrieve medical guidelines to ensure alignment with clinical standards. For patient-level reasoning, we propose to integrate professional tools such as visual models to enable quantitative assessments. Meanwhile, we propose to verify the reliability of each step to achieve evidence-based diagnosis, enforcing rigorous logical reasoning and a well-founded conclusion. Extensive experiments across a wide range of anatomical regions, imaging modalities, and diseases demonstrate the superiority of MedAgent-Pro to mainstream VLMs, agentic systems and state-of-the-art expert models. Ablation studies and human evaluation by clinical experts further validate its robustness and clinical relevance. Code is available at https://github.com/jinlab-imvr/MedAgent-Pro.
Existing reasoning benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) frequently fail to capture authentic creativity, often rewarding memorization of previously observed patterns. We address this shortcoming with Sudoku-Bench, a curated benchmark of challenging and unconventional Sudoku variants specifically selected to evaluate creative, multi-step logical reasoning. Sudoku variants form an unusually effective domain for reasoning research: each puzzle introduces unique or subtly interacting constraints, making memorization infeasible and requiring solvers to identify novel logical breakthroughs (``break-ins''). Despite their diversity, Sudoku variants maintain a common and compact structure, enabling clear and consistent evaluation. Sudoku-Bench includes a carefully chosen puzzle set, a standardized text-based puzzle representation, and flexible tools compatible with thousands of publicly available puzzles -- making it easy to extend into a general research environment. Baseline experiments show that state-of-the-art LLMs solve fewer than 15\% of puzzles unaided, highlighting significant opportunities to advance long-horizon, strategic reasoning capabilities.
Recent advances such as DeepSeek R1-Zero highlight the effectiveness of incentive training, a reinforcement learning paradigm that computes rewards solely based on the final answer part of a language model's output, thereby encouraging the generation of intermediate reasoning steps. However, these methods fundamentally rely on external verifiers, which limits their applicability to domains like mathematics and coding where such verifiers are readily available. Although reward models can serve as verifiers, they require high-quality annotated data and are costly to train. In this work, we propose NOVER, NO-VERifier Reinforcement Learning, a general reinforcement learning framework that requires only standard supervised fine-tuning data with no need for an external verifier. NOVER enables incentive training across a wide range of text-to-text tasks and outperforms the model of the same size distilled from large reasoning models such as DeepSeek R1 671B by 7.7 percent. Moreover, the flexibility of NOVER enables new possibilities for optimizing large language models, such as inverse incentive training.
Human beings naturally utilize multiple reasoning modalities to learn and solve logical problems, i.e., different representational formats such as natural language, code, and symbolic logic. In contrast, most existing LLM-based approaches operate with a single reasoning modality during training, typically natural language. Although some methods explored modality selection or augmentation at inference time, the training process remains modality-blind, limiting synergy among modalities. To fill in this gap, we propose Mixture-of-Thought (MoT), a framework that enables LLMs to reason across three complementary modalities: natural language, code, and a newly introduced symbolic modality, truth-table, which systematically enumerates logical cases and partially mitigates key failure modes in natural language reasoning. MoT adopts a two-phase design: (1) self-evolving MoT training, which jointly learns from filtered, self-generated rationales across modalities; and (2) MoT inference, which fully leverages the synergy of three modalities to produce better predictions. Experiments on logical reasoning benchmarks including FOLIO and ProofWriter demonstrate that our MoT framework consistently and significantly outperforms strong LLM baselines with single-modality chain-of-thought approaches, achieving up to +11.7pp average accuracy gain. Further analyses show that our MoT framework benefits both training and inference stages; that it is particularly effective on harder logical reasoning problems; and that different modalities contribute complementary strengths, with truth-table reasoning helping to overcome key bottlenecks in natural language inference.
Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown impressive capabilities in mathematical and logical reasoning. However, current LRMs rarely admit ignorance or respond with "I don't know". Instead, they often produce incorrect answers while showing undue confidence, raising concerns about their factual reliability. In this work, we identify two pathological reasoning patterns characterized by overthinking that contribute to the overconfident and incorrect answers: last-minute guessing and second-thought spiraling. To address these issues, we propose BARREL-a novel framework that promotes concise and boundary-aware factual reasoning. Our experiments show that BARREL-training increases the reliability of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B from 39.33% to 61.48%, while still achieving accuracy comparable to models finetuned on reasoning data generated by R1. These results demonstrate that our pilot study is inspiring to build more reliable and factual System 2 LRMs.
Recent advances in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have significantly improved their reasoning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities. However, their performance on complex logical reasoning tasks involving text-rich images remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce LogicOCR, a benchmark comprising 1,100 multiple-choice questions designed to evaluate LMMs' logical reasoning abilities on text-rich images, while minimizing reliance on domain-specific knowledge (e.g., mathematics). We construct LogicOCR by curating a text corpus from the Chinese National Civil Servant Examination and develop a scalable, automated pipeline to convert it into multimodal samples. First, we design prompt templates to steer GPT-Image-1 to generate images with diverse backgrounds, interleaved text-illustration layouts, and varied fonts, ensuring contextual relevance and visual realism. Then, the generated images are manually verified, with low-quality examples discarded. We evaluate a range of representative open-source and proprietary LMMs under both Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and direct-answer settings. Our multi-dimensional analysis reveals key insights, such as the impact of test-time scaling, input modality differences, and sensitivity to visual-text orientation. Notably, LMMs still lag in multimodal reasoning compared to text-only inputs, indicating that they have not fully bridged visual reading with reasoning. We hope LogicOCR will serve as a valuable resource for advancing multimodal reasoning research. The dataset is available at https://github.com/MiliLab/LogicOCR.