Challenge: Recent advances in automated reasoning with natural text suffer from a combinatorial explosion of the search space and high failure rates for problems requiring longer chains of reasoning.
Approach: They propose a Backward Chaining algorithm that decomposes reasoning into four sub-modules and implements it by few-shot prompted LLM inference.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm achieves sizable accuracy boosts over state-of-the-art forward reasoning methods on two challenging logical reasoning datasets.

Similar Papers

SymBa: Symbolic Backward Chaining for Structured Natural Language Reasoning (2025.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Among different methods for structured reasoning, we focus on backward chaining, where the goal is recursively decomposed into subgoals by searching and applying rules.
Approach: They propose a backward chaining system that integrates a symbolic solver and an LLM to improve the performance of LLM-based reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed system improves deductive, relational, and arithmetic reasoning benchmarks compared to baselines.
Bi-Chainer: Automated Large Language Models Reasoning with Bidirectional Chaining (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing unidirectional chaining methods suffer from low prediction accuracy and efficiency.
Approach: They propose a bidirectional chaining method which dynamically switches to depth-first reasoning in the opposite reasoning direction when it encounters multiple branching options within the current direction.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves sizable accuracy boots over unidirectional chaining frameworks on four challenging logical reasoning datasets.
Forward-Backward Reasoning in Large Language Models for Mathematical Verification (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Extensive experiments on six standard mathematical data sets and three LLMs show that FOBAR achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Approach: They propose to combine forward and backward reasoning to verify candidate answers . they propose to use a template to mask a number and ask the LLM to answer a backward question .
Outcome: Experiments on mathematical data show that proposed backward reasoning outperforms Self-Consistency.
Complex Reasoning in Natural Language (2023.acl-tutorials)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent research shows that pretrained language models are often brittle for complex reasoning tasks.
Approach: They propose to use pre-trained language models to teach machines to reason over texts . they will review recent promising approaches to tackling complex reasoning tasks .
Outcome: This tutorial reviews promising approaches to complex reasoning tasks . it reviews the methods that can be used to augment models with robustness .
Beyond Chain-of-Thought: A Survey of Chain-of-X Paradigms for LLMs (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning abilities when prompted with Chain-of-Thought (CoT).
Approach: They propose to categorize Chain-of-X methods by taxonomies of nodes, i.e., the X in CoX, and application tasks, and then categorise them by taxanomies and discuss potential future directions.
Outcome: The proposed methods are categorised by taxonomies of nodes, i.e., the X in CoX, and application tasks.
Exploring Backward Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Multi-step reasoning through in-context learning strategies have been extensively explored, highlighting the abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve problems in a step-wise manner.
Approach: They propose to use Large Language Models to generate answers from step-by-step reasoning by re-constructing the original question that led to the final answer.
Outcome: The proposed models show that they are able to reason about the conclusion and reconstruct the original question that led to the final answer.
Interpretable Proof Generation via Iterative Backward Reasoning (2022.naacl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing proof generation tasks require reasoning capabilities, but they usually just request for an answer without the reasoning procedure that would make it interpretable.
Approach: They propose an iterative backward reasoning model to solve the proof generation tasks on rule-based Question Answering.
Outcome: The proposed model improves in-domain performance and cross-domain transferability over existing models.
Neural Unification for Logic Reasoning over Natural Language (2021.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) is a computer program that can show that conjectures are logical consequences of a set of axioms.
Approach: They propose a transformer-based architecture for deriving conjectures given axioms . they propose 'neural unifier' and relative training procedure to train the model .
Outcome: The proposed architectures are able to answer queries with deep queries with a relatively low training time.
Enhancing Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting with Iterative Bootstrapping in Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a technique to enhance the reasoning abilities of Large language models (LLMs) however, the reasoning chains of demonstrations are observed to be prone to errors, which can lead to incorrect reasoning during inference.
Approach: They propose an iterative bootstrapping technique to enhance the reasoning abilities of Large language models (LLMs) by generating a series of reasoning steps to obtain the answer, and using the reasoning chains as exemplars to demonstrate the task.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the performance of Large language models (LLMs) on three reasoning tasks on ten datasets.
Feature Extraction and Steering for Enhanced Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) can solve reasoning and mathematical problems using the Chain-of-Thought technique, but require costly and long CoT data and fine-tuning.
Approach: They propose a method that uses Sparse Autoencoders to extract interpretable features from vanilla CoT and use them to steer the LLM's internal states.
Outcome: The proposed method uses Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to extract interpretable features from vanilla CoT and steer the LLM's internal states during generation.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations