Papers with explicit reasoning
TelAgentBench: A Multi-faceted Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-based Agents in Telecommunications (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Sunwoo Lee, Daseong Jang, Dhammiko Arya, Gyoung-eun Han, Injee Song, SaeRom Kim, Sangjin Kim, Seojin Lee, Seokyoung Hong, Sereimony Sek, Seung-Mo Cho, Sohee Park, Sungbin Yoon, Wonbeom Jang, Eric Davis
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming powerful agentic systems . generic benchmarks fail to assess realistic, non-English performance . |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate five core agentic capabilities: Reasoning, Planning, Action (tool-use), Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and Instruction Following. |
| Outcome: | The evaluations reveal significant performance disparities between models that employ explicit reasoning and those that do not. |
Open-World Attribute Mining for E-Commerce Products with Multimodal Self-Correction Instruction Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current AM methods focus on extracting attributes from unimodal text, underutilizing multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multimodal self-correction instruction tuning to extract new attributes from images and text with Multimodal Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two datasets. |
Leveraging Explicit Reasoning for Inference Integration in Commonsense-Augmented Dialogue Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to commonsense-augmented dialogue rely on implicit reasoning to integrate commonsensense inferences during response generation. |
| Approach: | They propose to separate commonsense reasoning into explicit steps for generating, selecting, and integrating commonsensense into dialogue responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model infers commonsense knowledge from dialogue contexts to improve response quality and naturalness of dialogue interactions. |
From Reasoning to Answer: Empirical, Attention-Based and Mechanistic Insights into Distilled DeepSeek R1 Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models generate explicit reasoning traces alongside final answers . the extent to which these traces influence answer generation remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They conduct empirical evaluation of Large Reasoning Models that include explicit reasoning . they also show that answer tokens attend substantially to reasoning tokens . |
| Outcome: | The results show that including explicit reasoning improves answer quality across domains . they also show that answer tokens attend substantially to reasoning tokens - the authors . |
BP4ER: Bootstrap Prompting for Explicit Reasoning in Medical Dialogue Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Medical dialogue generation (MDG) has gained increasing attention due to its substantial practical value. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which explicitly models MDG’s multi-step reasoning process and iteratively enhances this reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods across objective and subjective evaluations on two publicly available datasets. |
Reasoning about Ambiguous Definite Descriptions (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing resources to evaluate reasoning are not well suited to investigate the capability of resolving ambiguities by explicit reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ambiguous definite descriptions to create a benchmark dataset which requires models to resolve ambiguity by explicit reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model includes all information required to resolve the ambiguity in the prompt, which means a model does not require anything but reasoning to do well. |
MARS-Bench: A Multi-turn Athletic Real-world Scenario Benchmark for Dialogue Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Chenghao Yang, Yinbo Luo, Zhoufutu Wen, Qi Chu, Tao Gong, Longxiang Liu, Kaiyuan Zhang, Jianpeng Jiao, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Nenghai Yu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in real-world dialogue applications, but their robustness is criticized all along. |
| Approach: | They propose to use play-by-play text commentary to build a multi-turn athletic real-world scenario dialogue benchmark to evaluate three critical aspects of multi-turned conversations: ultra multi- turn, interactive multi-twist, and cross-turn tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks outperform open-source LLMs on three critical aspects of multi-turn conversations: ultra multi-turned, interactive multi- turn, and cross-turn tasks. |
Think Hard Only When Needed: A Hybrid Best-of-N and Beam Search for Efficient Test-Time Compute (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable reasoning and planning capabilities, yet their substantial inference-time cost significantly impedes deployment in resourceconstrained applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid inference pipeline that combines beam search and Best-of-N . THROW generates shorter initial trajectories and evaluates them using PRMs . |
| Outcome: | THROW achieves 1.54 and 14.38 latency speedups and 35.7% and 80.4% token reductions on average compared to Best-of-N and beam search . |
An Interpretable Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning Framework for Task-Oriented Dialogue Generation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to interpret task-oriented dialogue systems employ an implicit reasoning strategy that makes the model predictions uninterpretable to humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a neuro-symbolic approach that performs explicit reasoning that justifies model decisions by reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves better results and introduces an interpretable decision process. |
CRFR: Improving Conversational Recommender Systems via Flexible Fragments Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing conversational recommender systems (CRS) do not track the deep shift of user interest in conversations due to the complex of high-order and incomplete paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational context-based reinforcement learning model which does explicit multi-hop reasoning on KGs with a contextual context-driven reinforcement learning framework. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that CRFR improves on paths of interest shift in knowledge graphs (KGs) . |
Teach Small Models to Reason by Curriculum Distillation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) show strong System-2-style reasoning, but at the cost of significant computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage curriculum distillation framework which builds a robust internal problem-solving student model and then teaches the student model to externalize this knowledge as explicit reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms single-stage baselines on mathematical benchmarks and significantly outperformed LRMs on complex tasks. |
ReasonRec: A Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal Agent for Unified Recommendation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yihua Zhang, Mingfu Liang, Jiyan Yang, Rong Jin, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Luke Simon, Sijia Liu, Tianlong Chen, Xi Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal recommenders lack explicit reasoning and self-awareness of uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-augmented multimodal agent structured around a three-stage explicit reasoning pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves ranking metrics and performance on four standard recommendation tasks across five real-world datasets. |
Understanding and Patching Compositional Reasoning in LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | LLMs have marked a revolutonary shift, yet they falter when faced with compositional reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight method to patch compositional reasoning errors via editing the located MHSA modules in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to patch compositional reasoning errors using MHSA modules located within the layers of the LLMs. |
Facilitating Long Context Understanding via Supervised Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled them to process increasingly longer sequences, ranging from 2K to 2M tokens and even beyond. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic dataset in the financial domain that integrates Chain-of-Thought reasoning into LLMs in a supervised manner to facilitate effective long-context understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard GPT-4o-mini on the Loong benchmark and fine tunes LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct on the model, achieving a 28.0% gain on the financial subset. |
STReasoner: Empowering LLMs for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Time Series via Spatial-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models focus on predictive accuracy over reasoning, a gap exists . time series data are ubiquitous in real-world systems and exhibit complex spatio-temporal structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a time series reasoning model that integrates time series, graph structure, and text for explicit reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves average accuracy gains between 17% and 135% at 0.004x the cost of proprietary models and generalizes robustly to real-world data. |
FlowRAG: Synergizing Explicit Reasoning via Frequency-Aware Multi-Granularity Graph Flow (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation rely on implicit semantic relevance propagation. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware retrieval framework that improves both semantic recall and explicit reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that FlowRAG improves both semantic recall and explicit reasoning. |
Understand the Implication: Learning to Think for Pragmatic Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on annotated labels but overlook the reasoning process humans naturally use to interpret implicit meaning. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that includes explicit reasoning for both correct and incorrect interpretations and propose supervised fine-tuning to improve their performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset improves LLMs' pragmatic understanding by 11.12% across model families and 16.10% over label trained models. |
Graph-R1: Incentivizing the Zero-Shot Graph Learning Capability in LLMs via Explicit Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LLMs) provide a zero-shot alternative via explicit, long chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a GNN-free approach that reformulates graph tasks as textual reasoning problems solved by LRMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in zero-shot settings, producing interpretable and effective predictions. |
No Black Boxes: Interpretable and Interactable Predictive Healthcare with Knowledge-Enhanced Agentic Causal Discovery (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Deep learning models lacking interpretability and interactivity, authors say . lack of interactive mechanisms prevents clinicians from incorporating their own knowledge into decision-making process. |
| Approach: | a new deep learning model is proposed to improve interpretability and interactivity . authors propose a knowledge-enhanced agent-driven causal discovery framework . |
| Outcome: | a new model improves interpretability and interactivity on EHR data . the proposed model improve interpretability through explicit reasoning and causal analysis . |
Analyze Like a Venture Capitalist: Information-Gain and Knowledge Enhanced Graph Reasoning for Startup Success Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Most venture capital investments fail, while a few deliver outsized returns. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes relational evidence across sources . they propose combining information-gain-driven retriever and knowledge base to ground reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves +5.9% F1 and +22.1% Precision@5 over state-of-the-art baselines. |
All for One: LLMs Solve Mental Math at the Last Token With Information Transferred From Other Tokens (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) perform well on a multitude of computational tasks, yet their inner workings remain unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose two techniques to inhibit input-specific token computations in initial layers . they propose a transformer that allows for any token to immediately access all preceding tokens . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithms can perform on a variety of mental math tasks with high accuracy and transfer across models. |
Resolving the Security-Auditability Dilemma with Auditable Latent Chain-of-Thought Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments show that ALCA reduces the success rate of adaptive jailbreak attacks by over 40% compared to strong baselines, while preserving performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples internal reasoning from external output and allows the model to reconstruct its latent reasoning into human-readable text for supervision under specific guidance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the success rate of adaptive jailbreak attacks by over 40% compared to baselines while preserving performance. |
Emergent Misalignment via In-Context Learning: Narrow in-context examples can produce broadly misaligned LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Nikita Afonin, Nikita Andriianov, Vahagn Hovhannisyan, Nikhil Bageshpura, Kyle Liu, Kevin Zhu, Sunishchal Dev, Ashwinee Panda, Oleg Rogov, Elena Tutubalina, Alexander Panchenko, Mikhail Seleznyov
| Challenge: | Recent studies have documented emergent misalignment in language models adapted on narrow examples . Emergent misalignement occurs when models are trained on narrow set of misallocated examples resulting in harmful or misleading responses . |
| Approach: | They propose to explain in-context EM as conflict between safety objectives and context-following behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is adapted on 16 in-context examples and produces misaligned responses to benign queries. |
Seeing Isn’t Believing: Mitigating Belief Inertia via Active Intervention in Embodied Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) have enabled agents to tackle complex embodied tasks through environmental interaction, but they still make suboptimal decisions and perform ineffective actions. |
| Approach: | They propose an active belief intervention mechanism that generates explicit belief states . they characterize belief inertia as a key failure mode of LLM-based agents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant gains in task success rates across embodied benchmarks. |
TIME: Temporally Intelligent Meta-reasoning Engine for Context-Triggered Explicit Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning-oriented language models expose explicit reasoning as a long, front-loaded chain of “thinking” tokens before the main output, either always enabled or externally toggled at inference time. |
| Approach: | They introduce a behavioral alignment framework that learns explicit reasoning as a context-triggered control policy rather than a fixed response mode. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves TIMEBench scores over the base model in thinking and no-thinking modes while keeping output compact. |
PodBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Instruction-Aware Audio-Oriented Podcast Script Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Podcast script generation is a challenging task for large language models, but evaluation resources are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate podcast script generation using a multifaceted evaluation framework . PodBench is a prototype that integrates quantitative constraints with LLM-based quality assessment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates quantitative constraints with LLM-based quality assessment. |
How Long Reasoning Chains Influence LLMs’ Judgment of Answer Factuality (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as scalable judges for open-ended generation, yet how they form judgments remains insufficiently understood. |
| Approach: | They show that exposing reasoning influences LLM-based judgment . they also show that reasoning fluency and factuality critically shape judgment outcomes . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the presence of reasoning significantly alters judgment behavior . stronger judges exhibit more selective behavior and achieve higher judgment accuracy . |