Authors: Joseph Tafese, Milad Hooshyar, Sam Bayless, Nick Feng, Arie Gurfinkel
Organizations: University of Waterloo · Waterloo, Canada · Amazon · Seattle, USA
Abstract
Maintaining consistency between natural language documentation of business rules and their evolving internal implementations is a significant challenge in large-scale systems. We present SIRNA, a tool and framework for checking such consistency using SMT solvers. Using the case study of cost calculations in tax domains, we demonstrate a three-part system that combines large language models (LLMs) with formal verification methods. SIRNA translates natural language documentation into candidate SMT formulas using LLMs, followed by checks to validate the translations. Then, corresponding business rules are converted into equivalent SMT representations and validated against the natural language formalizations. Our method is generalizable to domains where business logic exists in both natural language documentation and programmatic implementation. Compared to baseline evaluations, SIRNA significantly reduces the number of false positives and false negatives while offering explainability for its findings.
Large Language Models perform well at natural language interpretation and reasoning, but their lack of formal correctness guarantees limits their adoption in regulated industries like finance and health-care that operate under strict policies. To address this limitation, we launched Automated Reasoning checks (ARc): a public service that (1) uses LLMs with optional human guidance to formalize natural language policies, allowing fine-grained control of the formalization process, and (2) uses inference-time autoformalization to validate logical correctness of natural language statements against those policies. ARc performs multiple redundant formalization steps at inference time, checking the formalizations for semantic equivalence. Our benchmarks show that ARc exceeds 99% soundness and achieves a near-zero false positive rate in identifying logical validity. Our approach produces auditable artifacts that substantiate the verification outcomes and can be used to improve the original text. ARc is the first commercial offering from a major cloud provider to integrate automated reasoning into a generative AI guardrail.
Extracting structured procedural knowledge from unstructured business documents is a critical yet unresolved bottleneck in process automation. While prior work has focused on extracting linear action flows from instructional texts, such as recipes, it has insufficiently addressed the complex logical structures, including conditional branching and parallel execution, that are pervasive in real-world regulatory and administrative documents. Furthermore, existing benchmarks are limited by simplistic schemas and shallow logical dependencies, restricting progress toward logic-aware large language models.To bridge this Logic Gap, we introduce BREX, a carefully curated benchmark comprising 409 real-world business documents and 2,855 expert-annotated rules. Unlike prior datasets centered on narrow service scenarios, BREX spans over 30 vertical domains, covering scientific, industrial, administrative, and financial regulations. We further propose ExIde, a structure-aware reasoning framework that investigates five distinct prompting strategies, ranging from implicit semantic alignment to executable grounding via pseudo-code generation. This enables explicit modeling of rule dependencies and provides an out-of-the-box framework for different business customers without finetuning their own large language models. We benchmark ExIde using 13 state-of-the-art large language models. Our extensive evaluation reveals that executable grounding serves as a superior inductive bias, significantly outperforming standard prompts in rule extraction. In addition, reasoning-optimized models demonstrate a distinct advantage in tracing long-range and non-linear rule dependencies compared to standard instruction-tuned models.
Tool-using large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in settings where their reliable behavior is governed by strict procedural manuals. Ensuring that such agents comply with the rules from these manuals is challenging, as they are typically written for humans in natural language while agent behavior manifests as an execution trace of tool calls. Existing evaluations of LLM agents rely on manually constructed benchmarks or LLM-based judges, which either do not scale or lack reliability for complex, long-horizon manuals. To overcome these limitations, we present MANTRA, a framework for automatically synthesizing machine-checkable compliance benchmarks from natural-language manuals and tool schemas. MANTRA independently generates (i) a symbolic world model capturing procedural dependencies, and (ii) a set of trace-level compliance checks for a given task, and validates their consistency using SMT solving. A structured repair loop resolves inconsistencies, requiring human intervention only as a fallback. %This yields benchmarks that are formally validated. Importantly, MANTRA supports arbitrary domains and long procedural manuals, and provides a tunable notion of task complexity which is utilized to automatically derive challenging tasks accompanying compliance checks. Using MANTRA, we build a new benchmark suite with 285 tasks across 6 domains scaling to 50+ page manuals with minimal human effort. Empirically, we show that the compliance checks are richer with stronger constraint enforcement compared to existing benchmarks. Additionally, the granularity of the checks can be used for debugging the agents' failure modes. These results demonstrate that combining automated benchmark generation with formally grounded validation methods enables scalable and reliable benchmarking of tool-using agents.