Structured Reasoning

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Overview

Structured reasoning aims to make AI systems solve multi-step problems by organizing information into explicit plans, logical rules, graphs, tables, or evolving states. Common approaches include chain-of-thought and hierarchical planning, symbolic constraints and program execution, structured memory, and step-level verification or recurrent refinement; training uses curated traces, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Systems are tested on logic puzzles, mathematics, multi-hop questions, structured tables, and visual or scientific tasks, where performance often declines as problems grow deeper or inputs become harder to parse. A central challenge is ensuring that a correct final answer follows from valid, evidence-grounded steps, while keeping the reasoning reliable and efficient across tasks and model sizes.

Latest papers

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86 papers9 papers in the last four weeks, up 125% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Cognitive Schemas, Laws and Tasks

    Oct 7, 2026Antal Jakovác, András TelcsKnowledge RepresentationStructured Reasoning

    HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics, Computational Sciences Department, Data and Compute Intensive Sciences Research Group, Budapest, Hungary.

  2. Long-Horizon Textual World Modeling through Structured Reasoning

    Oct 5, 2026Fangxin Wang, Xiang Gao, Yuguang Yao +3World ModelsAction-Conditioned World Models

    Intuit AI Research

  3. Correct Verdicts, Flawed Reasoning: Structured Auditing of LLM-based Vulnerability Reasoning

    Oct 5, 2026Boyue Caroline Hu, Kaivalya Ahir, Ronghao Ni +1LLM AuditingSoftware Vulnerability Detection

    Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsilvanya, USA

  4. Plan Canvas: Fixed Reasoning Regions for Continuous Language Flows

    Oct 5, 2026Miaohe Niu, Pengxiang Li, Jingbo Zhu +1LLM Reasoning with GraphsCoT Reasoning

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, China · Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China · NiuTrans Research, Shenyang, China

  5. Hob-VL: A Benchmark for Visually Grounded Boolean Reasoning

    Oct 1, 2026Yuzhou Wang, Emile Anand, Ijay NarangVLM EvaluationVisual Question Answering

    Georgia Institute of Technology

  6. Does Learning Protein Folding Generalize to Broader Reasoning?

    Sep 30, 2026Yong Liu, Zhanpeng Shi, Yizhou Dang +4Protein Structure PredictionStructured Reasoning

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute +1

  7. PathAnchor: Path-Structured Evidence for Scientific Agents

    Sep 30, 2026Qiuhui Chen, Jiafan Lu, Shuaimin Tang +5Evidence-Grounded ReasoningScientific QA

    School of Information Science and Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology · College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University · Tencent

  8. Neural Structural Reasoner: A Brain-inspired Architecture for Reasoning over Structured Knowledge

    Sep 29, 2026Zixing Jia, Yuhang Pan, Ni JiLink PredictionRelational Reasoning

    Beijing Institute for Brain Research, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, 102206, China · Chinese Institute for Brain Research, Beijing; Beijing, 102206, China · Beijing Key Laboratory of Brain Science and Brain-Machine Interface +1

  9. Rethinking Reasoning Paths as Phase-Structured Trajectories

    Sep 29, 2026Zhenghao He, Guangzhi Xiong, Sanchit Sinha +3Structured ReasoningLanguage Model Probing

    Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia

  10. Not Too Hard, Not Too Easy: Learning from Intermediate States for LLM Structured Reasoning

    Sep 27, 2026Hongbo Chen, Guohua Lu, Ting Dang +1Structured Reasoning in Language ModelsSelf-Training for Language Models

    University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand · University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

  11. Externalized CPDAG Summaries Improve LLM Causal Deduction

    Sep 25, 2026Wentao Sun, João Paulo Nogueira, Dominique Verchere +2Causal Reasoning in Language ModelsCausal Reasoning

    Nokia Bell Labs · Télécom SudParis · IRISA

  12. Capable yet Parsimonious: Extracting and Characterizing Hidden Chain-of-Thought in Frontier Models

    Sep 22, 2026Xiaoyu Luo, Tao Ren, Wenrui Yu +3LLM InterpretabilityCoT Reasoning

    Department of Computer Science Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark · Department of Electronic Systems Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark · Seafill

  13. Large Language Models (LLMs) for Telecom Root Cause Analysis (RCA): A Structured Reasoning Framework for Evidence-Grounded Diagnosis

    Sep 2, 2026Hao Zhou, Mandar Kulkarni, Hao Chen +3Root Cause AnalysisLLM Reasoning

    Jianzhong · Samsung Research America, Plano, Texas, TX 75023, USA

  14. DARS: Dual-Level Credit Assignment RL with Structured Reasoning for Instruction-Based Image Editing

    Aug 20, 2026Haoxiang Cao, Jiajiong Cao, Xuanpu Zhang +2RL for Image EditingCredit Assignment in RL

    South China Normal University · KlingAI Research

  15. Localize, Then Reason: Visual Latent Structural Reasoning for Molecular Properties and Edits

    Aug 13, 2026Xingqiao Lin, Junmei Wang, Haocheng TangLatent Visual ReasoningStructured Reasoning

    Department of Chemical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, United States · Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Computational Chemical Genomics Screening Center, School of Pharmacy, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA · Khoury College of Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

  16. From Atomic Evidence to Logical Composition: Structured Compositional Reasoning over Compound Answer Options

    Aug 13, 2026Obed Junias, Maria Leonor PachecoCompositional ReasoningMultiple-Choice Question Answering

    University of Colorado Boulder

  17. sLTN: Structural Logic Tensor Networks

    Aug 11, 2026Davide Rinaldi, Luciano SerafiniTensor NetworksLogic Tensor Networks

    Nokia Bell Labs · Fondazione Bruno Kessler

  18. CircuitReason-1k: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Visual-to-Symbolic Reasoning inElectrical Circuits

    Aug 10, 2026Xinqi Yang, Kang An, Tengyue Wang +8Structured ReasoningVisually Grounded Reasoning

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · South China University of Technology · ModelBest +6

  19. Reasoning Consensus: Structural Ensembling of LLM Reasoning via Weighted DAG Aggregation

    Jul 30, 2026Amruta Parulekar, Jinu Lee, Dilek Hakkani-Tür +1Structured ReasoningLLM Reasoning with Graphs

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  20. Penelope: Localized Latent Recurrence for Efficient Structured Reasoning

    Jul 28, 2026Yutong Chen, Shouqian Shi, Xinran Liu +5Structured Reasoning in Language ModelsDecoder-Only Language Models

  21. SymStep: Symbolic Step Verification for Logical Reasoning

    Jul 25, 2026Aida Usmanova, Rui Gao, Dilshod Azizov +2Constraint PropagationSymbolic Reasoning

    Leuphana University of Lüneburg · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

  22. Reason Popper-ly: Patching In-Context Reasoning with Inductive Logic Programming

    Jul 25, 2026Zirong Chen, Meiyi MaReasoning Trace AnalysisReasoning Consistency in Language Models

    Department of Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, USA

  23. Are you Talking Logic to Me? Assessing Language Models Syllogistic Reasoning Capabilities

    Jul 22, 2026Hanna Abi Akl, Fabien Gandon, Catherine Faron +1Knowledge RepresentationStructured Reasoning

    Université Côte d’Azur, Inria, CNRS, I3S, Sophia Antipolis, France · Data ScienceTech Institute, Paris, France

  24. Anatomy of a Sound Neural Reasoner: One-Shot Amortization, First-Pass Poisoning, and Search Inertness in Clue-Rich Completion

    Jul 22, 2026Aleksey KomissarovSudoku SolvingInference-Time Search

    Neapolis University, Pafos, Cyprus

  25. SEGRA: Structured Experience-Guided Graph Reasoning Agent for Gremlin Based Question Answering

    Jul 21, 2026Saiyue Lyu, Mariam Dundua, Vishaal Kapoor +5LLM Reasoning with GraphsLLM Agent Skill Learning

    University of British Columbia · Amazon

  26. CoTu at EXACT 2026: Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning for Transparent Educational QA

    Jul 16, 2026Quoc-Khang Tran, Minh-Thien Nguyen, Phu-An Thai +3Explainable Artificial IntelligenceLLM-Based Program Synthesis

    Can Tho University, Can Tho city, Vietnam · Tay Do University, Can Tho city, Vietnam

  27. Track, Rank, Crack: Epistemic Working Memory Scales Multi-Hop Reasoning in Language Agents

    Jul 14, 2026Ning LiuMulti-Hop QAAgent Memory

    Independent Researcher

  28. Think Through a Bottleneck: Hourglass Reasoning for Rigorous Induction

    Jul 13, 2026Huan ZhuStructured ReasoningLLM Self-Refinement

    Peking University

  29. Structured Thoughts For Improved Reasoning And Context Pruning

    Jul 11, 2026Zain Sarwar, Supriyo Chakraborty, Berkcan Kapusuzoglu +5Efficient Language Model ReasoningStructured CoT Reasoning

    University of Chicago · Capital One

  30. Interventional Grounding Audits: Black-Box Premise-Dependency Tests for LLM Chain-of-Thought via Predicate Substitution

    Jul 11, 2026Hironao NakamuraCoT FaithfulnessLLM Grounding

    Independent Researcher