Immediate Inference: The Missing Foundation in Large Language Model Logical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on LLMs has focused on fine-grained skill decomposition and consistency probing at the propositional level. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark evaluating immediate inference that evaluates elemental operations over categorical propositions and proposes a model that uses immediate inferential reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark demonstrates that models lack robust operator grounding, oscillating between structural reasoning and surface pattern matching, inconsistent handling of quantifiers and negation. |
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